Let's continue with an examination of the developer's claims from their letter to the Argus and see how the facts do not support these claims. 

Claim: A comprehensive surface-water hydrology assessment was also conducted, which concluded that the proposed redevelopment would have no significant impact on flooding in the adjacent urban area.

Fact 1: The surface-water hydrology assessment relied on outdated data for sea level rise change and did not take account of the more recent data on Climate Change

Fact 2: The assessment did not themselves do any review of sea level changes and, in fact, argued that “investigation of the impacts of sea level rise is beyond the scope of this study, however it would be in the City’s interest to undertake further modelling to assess how climate change and sea level rise impacts could be mitigated.”  How can an assessment be comprehensive if it acknowledges that such a critical factor such as sea level rise was beyond the scope of this study?  

Fact 3: The assessment did not present any assessment of how much more frequently flooding would occur.

How, exactly, does this constitute a ‘comprehensive’ assessment?

Fact 4: The developers approached residents in the nearest streets to the River Club to offer flood mitigation measures at the developer’s expense.

Who is he kidding? If the flooding risk was of no significance, why is the developer offering to pay for mitigation? Or will he tomorrow deny that he made that offer? The flooding experienced by nearby residents, as pictured above, will only get worse should the development go ahead.

Claim: It’s a complete fabrication that I instructed the project hydrologist not to meet with the community.

Fact: On the 4th November 2019, an Observatory resident contacted me to ask what he should do because he had been approached by the River Club development’s hydrologists who wanted to meet him “to discuss new measurements they have made” so that residents “were not misinformed about anything.”  I advised the resident to tell the hydrologists that they would be welcome to come to public meeting organized by the OCA where they would be able to speak to the community. The hydrologist confirmed in an email to the resident, copied to me, dated 6th November, that they would follow up with me. They never did. When it came to February, the resident noted in his objection to the BAR that he had phoned the hydrologist to ask why they did not follow up with the OCA and was told “his clients did not want to engage via the OCA.”  This is all documented in writing in his submission on the BAR.

Where exactly is the fabrication? Is the developer saying the resident made it all up? Is he saying that his consultant hydrologist lied to the resident?  You be judge of who is fabricating here. 

Claim: We have had numerous public participation meetings that have included the independent hydrologists.

Fact: The public participation meetings are those that were mandated by the EIA and BAR processes under the law. We are not aware of any meetings the developers sought to hold over and above that which they were legally obliged to hold.

Claim: I have also made various attempts to meet with residents to allay this known concern with the facts, but was in one instance actually blocked.

Fact: This is a curious claim. We are not aware of his approaching the OCA or residents to engage. The developer has not produced any evidence of his attempts to approach the OCA to hear the community’s concerns. We are not aware of any instance when he was actually blocked, except for his most recent phone call where he first threatened to sue me for defamation and then said he wanted to meet with us. Is he serious in thinking that that threatening to sue someone should be counted as an effort to allay concerns with facts?

Claim: We have also conducted extensive and constructive engagements with the majority of Khoi and San leaders in the Peninsula (the First Nations Collective), who have expressed their full support for the development.

Fact 1: The engagements have not been extensive and constructive. He has deliberately excluded First Nations leaders who do not want the development. He has confined his consultation to the First Nations Collective who are a small group of leaders who appear to agree with his proposals.

Fact 2: The First Nation Collective only appeared in the HIA in 2019 after the developers were criticized for not having First Nations support. If the engagements had been extensive, why was no mention of this Collective made in 2016, 2017 and 2018? The Heritage Appeal Tribunal was not told of the Collective when it first convened in 2018.

Fact 3: The mandate of the First Nations Collective is not stated in any public document. Its only public presence has been to express support for the developer.

Fact 4: The First Nations Collective does not represent the majority of majority of Khoi and San leaders in the Peninsula. For example, the Cochoqua organization in the Collective is not mandated to speak for the Cochoqua Royal House. In fact, the Cochoqua Royal House is part of the 15 First Nation leadership groups calling for Provincial Heritage grading which is a step which the developer has dismissed as a strategy to block his development.

The Cochoqua Royal House has distanced itself from the two Cochoqua individuals cited in the River Club’s media briefings and made it clear they do not represent the Cochoqua Sovereign House of South Africa and cannot speak on its behalf. Chief Danny Bolton of the Cochoqua Royal House wrote to fellow Khoi leaders that “Johnnie Jansen registered a cultural organization (Cochoqua) a few years ago; however, neither he nor his cultural organization is connected to the  Cochoqua Sovereign House and, interestingly, he appears not to  respect or acknowledge the same… Regarding Leader Tania Cedas-Kleinhans, we regard her as the  respected  leader of her cultural organization IRASA.   However, in the matter of the TRUP one finds it rather strange that she, whom we regard as an aboriginalist, decided to side with the development? Nonetheless, for the record, Leader Tania's appointment as a Cochoqua Chief was officially withdrawn due to irreconcilable differences of thoughts."

Other Khoi chiefs have also distanced themselves from First Nations Collective.

Paramount Chief David Johannes, leader of the Cochoqua Kingdom Council, commented on the Two Rivers LSDF explicitly: “A sense of place and landscapes have been shown to be of equal importance to people as are artefacts and buildings. The TRUP area has both these heritage aspects. It has historical landscapes and buildings that are significant to us, the Goringhaicona and Cochoqua indigenous people. We would be very distressed to see these changed or destroyed by the development of the site. Socio-economic benefits do not compensate for loss of place…  The proposed development at the River Club … is seemingly supported via an irregular ‘collusion’ between the City of Cape Town, the Western Cape Government and the River Club developers. The development will place blocks of between 24 and 47m tall onto the floodplain, on land that is yet to be graded for its heritage significance. Once it is concreted over, there is no recovering lost intangible heritage.”

Nothing could be further from the truth that the majority of Khoi and San leaders in the Western Cape have expressed their full support for the development.

Claim: The redevelopment will create more than 6000 vital jobs.

Fact: The BAR actually says that the number of jobs that will be created are 5 239. However, most of these jobs are during the construction phase. The number of long-term sustainable jobs created is estimated as merely 860. Note that the development will also destroy those jobs that exist at the site currently.

Claim: It will contribute to the upgrade of surrounding roads and public transport infrastructure

Fact: The development will focus on vehicular transport. It makes no contribution to improving public transport. In fact, given the parlous state of public transport in Cape Town, the development is likely to exacerbate reliance on private transport, adding a sizeable bolus of privately owned vehicles to the surrounding road networks, adding to traffic loads on congested roads.

Claim: The development will critically provide developer-subsidised inclusionary housing.

Fact: Only 4% of the development will provide developer-subsidised inclusionary housing. This is simply the effective minimum that current land use planning expects developers to meet. Nothing extraordinary here. In fact, this is actually less than what the draft Two Rivers Local Spatial Development Framework, itself a very problematic document, says should be provided on site.

Fact: The inclusionary housing will be restricted to a very narrow band of household income. Far from reaching the most needy, this will provide accommodation to public servants in the family income bracket of R22 000 to R30 000 per month. Even then, this income will not enable them to afford fees for private schools, such as the private school to be developed on the site, so their children will have to travel to cheaper schools elsewhere in the environs.

Fact: The balance of accommodation provided (16% of the footprint on site will be high-end accommodation which will have to cross-subsidise the inclusive housing component).

Claim: All this information is contained the draft Basic Assessment Report (BAR), advertised for public comment.

Fact: This is partly true. The information contained in the BAR was advertised for public comment and was available to the public. In fact, it is the information in the BAR that we have used to rebut all the developers’ arguments. But here’s a strange thing. Within a few days of the consultant-determined closing date for comments, the Environmental Consultants removed all the documents from their website, meaning that any Interested and Affected Partners (I&APs) who wanted to comment after the 14th of February would not have had access to the documents in order to comment. The OCA asked for the documents to be restored, which they were after a few days. But here’s another very strange thing. Although most documents were restored, two of the documents were not restored. When we asked, we were told that they “inadvertently contained proprietary information” for the rezoning application. We have read these documents and cannot see anything that could be called proprietary.

So, the public actually could not access these documents at all, not even a redacted version that removed what was supposedly ‘proprietary.’ Perhaps the developer wants to explain why these documents were removed, and then after they were caught removing them, why not all documents were restored, or why redacted versions were not restored if there actually was any proprietary information?  It is therefore not correct to state that “All this information is contained the draft Basic Assessment Report (BAR), advertised for public comment.”

What exactly does the developer have to hide?

Claim: All comments received will be included in the final BAR submitted to the department of environmental affairs and planning for a decision. The OCA’s claims that they have started the online petition due to the BAR process being “cumbersome” is rubbish.

Fact: I&APs had to read more than 2000 pages in 30 days and then formulate comments. I&APs had to go back to previous reports to check whether your comments have been addressed or not. Sometimes new information was introduced in new documents which are not addressed by the old reports. This creates a very convoluted process that is very cumbersome. Rubbish may be what the developer wants to believe, but as far as we concerned, that rubbish is just in his fertile imagination. Perhaps like the rubbish that gets dumped on his property that he can’t seem to clean and which then he claims is forcing him to lay down 150 000 square metres of concrete.

Claim: It is nothing more than another attempt to distort the truth.

Fact: Every update we have provided has been supported by evidence, not distortions, and has numerous hyperlinks to our sources. We leave the reader to judge who is responsible for distorting the truth.

Claim: We remain committed to working with everyone who wants to create a more inclusive, sustainable and prosperous city and province.

Fact: The developers work only with those who agree with them and their project. The OCA has worked with numerous other civics around the city on issues to do with inclusion, the city as a commons, affordable housing and sustainable development. We don’t see the developers engaging with anyone who has a different opinion about the River Club project even when other parties have a track record of working towards an inclusive, sustainable and prosperous city and province.

Claim: The truth is that the petition by the Observatory Civic Association (OCA) is riddled with lies and misinformation.

Fact: We have presented rebuttals to every claim made by the developers. You be the judge of who is the source of lies and misinformation here.

Claim: The developers say we are “a fringe interest group” who have an “isolationist agenda - even if it means blocking jobs and other socio-economic benefits for the people of Cape Town.”

Fact: Let’s be clear. We are not a ‘fringe interest group.’ We are 14 640 people who have signed this petition. It is the developer who has an agenda and has already stated he is tired of people blocking him from getting his way. He is willing to sue me for defamation simply because I have criticized his agenda. This is not about job and socio-economic benefits. It is about a small elite destroying heritage and the environment for their private benefits.