09 October 2005

RESIDENTS of two wealthy suburbs have won a High Court reprieve allowing them to keep the boom gates they put up — at least for a while.

A group from Morningside, Sandton, and another from Illovo joined forces to obtain an urgent Joburg High Court interdict to stop the council from pulling down their boom gates this week.

The Redhill Residents Association obtained the order on Tuesday.

The groups had been given conditional permission to keep the gates, but appealed against this to the council. The appeal was rejected.

The Morningside residents were allowed to limit access to their neighbourhood provided the access point along Redhill Road was kept open during peak traffic hours on weekdays. The Illovo residents were ordered to remove the electric motor from a massive gate along Fifth Avenue.

The groups claimed they were repeatedly ignored when they asked the council to provide reasons for the conditions.

They were told that failure to comply with the council’s conditions would result in the booms being removed by the deadline given this week.

The High Court granted an order blocking the city from removing the structures until the matter relating to the conditions had been resolved.

Patricia Ann Redford, a member of the Redhill Residents Association, accused the council of acting as a law unto itself.

"We’ve got a list of six, seven, eight attempts by the attorneys and other parties to try to get the reasons in writing for the arbitrary decisions that were made, but we were completely ignored."

Redford said that Redhill Road was not meant to carry through traffic.

She told Metro that opening the gates during peak hours of traffic posed a security risk for homeowners in the area as most incidents of driveway robberies in the area took place during peak hours.

According to Fifth Avenue Cul de Sac’s application, "the proposed change to a manual gate will have no effect on access, save that it will involve more effort from the guard".

Welcoming the court order, Redford said both residents and the City had to comply with the policy documents.

"When residents have done everything and complied with everything, it is completely and utterly unreasonable for them [the City] to turn around and say oh no sorry, not prepared to talk, to negotiate, not prepared to do anything, just jump in the lake. It’s not okay."