Lakes Eco and Golf Estate

by Vivien Vibert (Waleaf Secretary)

I must take issue with Mr Jan Breytenbach who slated critics of the massive Lakes Golf proposals in your 25 January 2006 edition. He makes many inaccurate statements of which the most glaring are:

He states 'categorically' that there will 'no longer be an airfield' and 'one golf course has been removed altogether'. Either he has no idea what his employer the developer is doing, or he is intentionally misleading the public, because in the most recent official documents, the Scoping Report published on 15 December 2005 there are TWO golf courses AND an airfield. HilLand, the environmental consultants, have been preparing the Scoping Report from July 2004 at the latest. Are we to believe the documents now lodged at the Municipality and libraries, or are we to believe Mr Breytenbach?

He implies that desalination has been discussed at public meetings - it has NOT. The possibility of desalination was mentioned at an early stage but no details were given as to where such industrial plant would be sited, how much water it would generate, what would happen to the briney by-product. Without such information, no debate is possible. In July 2005, (Guide Plan Amendment process) the developer lodged, in response to objections, 10 pages of information about how desalination works, and how there are plants in Arab countries - but with NO information about a plant for this site. Now in the Scoping Report, one can deduce from a late - 2005 correspondence with George Municipality that Kleinkrans is targeted for a desalination plant and the Lakes sewage too. The implications of this are enormous, with pipelines being proposed to run in the road reserves between the Lakes and Kleinkrans. What does Sanparks think about that? Do the people of Kleinkrans even know?

Mr Jan Breytenbach says there will employee housing, schools, a training centre, colleges and universities. Really? Where are all these buildings going to be sited? Mr Breytenbach should take a trip to the Municipality himself, and look through the enormous pile of unindexed, unpaginated documents which go by the name of Scoping Report, and find all these buildings on the plan in there. He will not succeed. If the developer proposes to site all these buildings on some other land, where is it? And where are the planning and environmental applications which would have to be made in respect of such other land?