Finance

Yes, the plans and initiatives to help struggling municipalities to overcome their adverse financial problems include;

1. Long term financial planning and modelling:

• Assistance with the preparation of financial recovery plans, short/medium term financial sustainability plan,
• Assistance with the preparation of long term financial plans with the goal of ensuring municipalities proactively mitigate financial constraints and challenges to ensure financial sustainability and viability. 

2. Revenue Enhancement Initiatives  

• Assistance provided to municipalities to conduct Tariff Modelling, which assists municipalities in determining the most appropriate tariff, taking into account cost coverage and affordability. Setting a tariff that covers costs ensures that the municipality can charge households for services without running into a deficit, whereas an affordable tariff ensures the ability of consumers to pay for services received;
• On-site support to municipalities to assist with tariff modelling to ensure those who have been trained are able to implement tariff modelling as part of their annual tariff review process.

3. Identification of Expenditure Gains and Efficiencies:

• Monthly monitoring of revenue and expenditure through in-year monitoring processes;
• Monthly monitoring of debtors, debtors management through in-year monitoring processes;
• Evaluation of credit management policies and strategies applied within a given municipality;
• Oversight on borrowings and investments;
• Oversight of intergovernmental transfers to municipalities from provincial and national government;
• Facilitate the reduction of government debt owed to municipalities.
• Further training on the Budget Reforms to improve conformance;
• Monitoring project management and planning of capital projects implementation via the ‘Top 10 Capital projects monitoring’ mechanism;      
• Conducting monthly cash flow analysis to ascertain the true cash position; and
• Roll-out of funding to municipalities with regards to the Western Cape Financial Management Support Grant in relation to system challenges identified.