What the City won't show you

To test whether the King David Mowbray disposal is sound, residents asked the City for the documents behind it. The valuation. The traffic study. The City refused both, on the same grounds, days before the deadline to comment. And the railway station the whole transport case rests on? The City swore it holds no records of it at all.

There is a simple way to find out whether a public decision is sound: read the documents it rests on. South African law provides for exactly that. The Promotion of Access to Information Act gives any member of the public the right to ask an organ of state for its records, and obliges the state to hand them over unless a specific exemption applies.

So residents did the obvious thing. They asked the City for the records that would show whether the disposal of this public land stands up: the valuation that sets the price, and the traffic study that tests whether the roads can carry the development.

The City refused both. When residents also asked for the records behind the railway station that the City's own transport case calls its "backbone", the answer was stranger still, and we come to it below.

The record of what has been withheld

The reasons rotate between two exemptions. The first, section 44, protects the internal advice a public body relies on to reach a decision, so that officials can deliberate candidly. The second, section 45, lets a body refuse a request so broad it would divert its resources unreasonably. Both are legitimate provisions. The question is whether they fit these records.

Why "deliberative process" does not fit the valuation

The valuation is the number that decides everything. Under the Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations, councillors must be told the land's fair market value before they may vote to dispose of it, and the regulations require the valuation and the method used to be stated in the information placed before them.

The City has already put its valuations into public use. It published a figure of R171 million to justify the disposal, and disclosed a second figure of about R395 million in a letter refusing to extend the comment period. It is relying on those numbers, in public, to argue that the deal is fair.

A figure the City is actively using in public to justify giving away public land is not confidential internal advice. The City cannot rely on both the number and its secrecy at the same time.

Access law recognises this. A public-interest override applies where a record would reveal whether the state is complying with the law, and where the public interest in seeing it outweighs the harm. Whether public land is being disposed of at a proper value is squarely such a matter. And even where part of a report is genuinely internal, the law requires the rest, the method, the comparable sales, the breakdown, the valuer's name, to be released. A blanket refusal of the whole report does not meet that standard. An internal appeal has been lodged on these grounds.

The residents did not simply accept it

PAIA gives a refused requester a right of internal appeal to the municipality before any court. That right has now been used. Formal section 74 appeals have been lodged against each of these refusals: against the withholding of the valuation report, against the withholding of the Traffic Impact Assessment and its terms of reference, and against the refusal of the tribunal's recusal records. Each appeal makes the same basic point in a different setting, that an exemption written to protect genuine internal deliberation is being used to keep back the factual records a resident needs to test a public decision, and that where the public-interest override or the duty to sever applies, a blanket refusal cannot stand. The appeals are on the record and awaiting the City's decision.

A fourth question: who gets to decide?

The disposal will not be settled by the comment process alone. If it proceeds, the rezoning of the land falls to be decided by the City's Municipal Planning Tribunal, the panel that rules on major land-use applications. So residents asked a fair question: when a tribunal member has a conflict of interest, is it recorded that they step aside? That is what the recusal records would show. The City refused to produce them.

Why the question matters is a matter of public record. National planning law caps a tribunal member's continuous service at ten years, a rotation rule meant to keep the body independent. In 2025 the City amended its own planning by-law: it removed the word "once" from the reappointment clause and added a provision that treats a reappointment taking effect a month or more after a term ends as "non-continuous", which resets that ten-year clock. On the City's own reappointment records, long-serving members whose terms had expired were reappointed shortly afterward. The City is at the same time the owner, the seller and the applicant in this disposal, and the tribunal that would approve the rezoning is appointed by that same Council. Whether members recuse themselves where conflicts arise is therefore not a technicality; it goes to whether the body that decides looks independent of the body that stands to gain. That is why the recusal records were asked for, and why refusing them, on a "resources" ground the City's own letter contradicts by pointing to its published minutes, does not answer the question.

None of this asserts that any tribunal member has acted improperly, and no court has ruled on the by-law amendment. It is a question of structure and appearance, the appearance of independence that public decisions are required to have, and it is one the released records and the City's own by-law raise on their face.

The pattern is the point

Taken one at a time, each refusal has a form to hide behind. Taken together, they describe a process the public is asked to endorse but not allowed to examine. The documents that would let a resident test the disposal, the price, the traffic, the transport backbone, are precisely the documents the City will not release, and the refusals tend to arrive as the window to use them closes.

There is one revealing exception. Asked for the records behind the railway station that the City's transport case calls its "backbone", the City confirmed, under affidavit, that no station feasibility study, no business case, and no agreement with PRASA exists. In that instance the absence of a record is itself the answer.

None of this is an allegation of illegality. It is an observation about transparency. The Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations were written to make the disposal of public assets open to scrutiny. A process that depends on the public asking exactly the right question, and then meets the answer with an exemption, is not the open process those rules were meant to produce.

The comment period closes 7 August 2026. Anyone can object and register as an Interested and Affected Party. One email does it: state who you are, where you live, that you object, and that you want to be registered. Send it to Development.Mowbray@capetown.gov.za and mowbray@infinity.capetown.

Submit your objection, takes 2 minutes