CCID hosts its annual AGM and celebrates 18th clean audit in a row

On 19 November, the Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) hosted its annual general meeting (AGM) and celebrated its 18th clean audit in a row at the newly revamped City Hall in Darling Street.

The AGM was held under the theme: “Moving the Cape Town Central City towards a 24-hour economy” and speakers at the event stressed that a growing and vibrant downtown such as the Cape Town’s CBD must be one capable of meeting the needs of an ever-increasing footfall as this economy expands into the night.

CCID chairperson Rob Kane said: “We often talk about a 24-hour CBD and, in truth, the Central City is probably at this stage of its life more of an 18-hour-a-day CBD. But we’re fast moving towards that 24-hour, round-the-clock downtown and, as we do, it’s imperative for the CCID to think about what it wants to be, and what we will require from our partners, to reach that milestone successfully.”

The partners to whom Kane referred include, on the public sector side, the City of Cape Town, the South African Police Service and, for the past two years, the Western Cape Government, while on the private sector side it included property and business owners as well as residents of the Central City.

“These are all vital partners with whom we wish to work closely to ensure our CBD remains the safest and cleanest in South Africa,” said Kane.

He also noted that while the Central City still had a way to go towards becoming a 24-hour CBD, the CCID itself was already a 24-hour, round-the-clock service provider: “But we do require more support particularly from our public sector partners, as the CBD today is very different from what it was even just three years ago. The footfall that now comes into the Central City in terms of an after-hours economy – from the entertainment sector to businesses that operate at night such as call centres and medical facilities – is increasing and growing rapidly from year to year.

“As the CCID, our budget can only stretch so far, and the hours in a day that our teams work can only last so long. We need to nurture and expand our existing partnerships with government agencies – locally, regionally and nationally – and explore new collaborations.”

Tasso Evangelinos, CEO of the CCID, agreed: “A growing CBD such as ours must be one that is capable of meeting the needs of an ever-increasing footfall as this expands into the night. You only need to visit the Central City on an average weekend night, or even on many normal weekday nights, to see the volumes that we are now dealing with, from the proliferation of new restaurants opening their doors to patrons, to the huge numbers of call centre staff on their coffee breaks outside the buildings from which they operate.”

In terms of the year ahead and indeed the future beyond that, Evangelinos noted that each of the CCID’s four departments had prioritised their needs as the Central City moved towards a 24-hour economy, and hoped to collaborate primarily with its various public partners but also those in the private sector to achieve this.

In terms of Safety and Security:

• The need for more strategic visible deployment
• Embracing all technology available to the CCID to improve safety
• Increasing partnerships with law agencies as well as other CBD stakeholders
• Addressing social issues more effectively
• Enforcing bylaws, and
• Alleviating peak-hour traffic congestion.

In terms of Urban Management:

• Increasing interaction and relationship building with stakeholders
• Providing and maintaining a clean environment including hotspot cleaning and cleaning up the debris that remains behind once the nighttime economy has gone home, and
• Being able to report incidents to the relevant departments within the City, and having them attended to as swiftly as possible. These include things such as streetlight outages; faulty traffic lights; burst pipes and blocked drains.

In terms of Social Development:

• Increased deployment of fieldworkers on call after hours and who can respond to the many emergencies that arise during that after-hours period
• Ongoing liaison with NGO partners so that they can intervene particularly in cases where children are found on the street and need immediate care and protection in terms of the Children’s Act
• Being able to increasingly assist seriously ill clients to hospital when an ambulance in not required, and
• Being able to increasingly assist with the emergency overnight placement of mothers with children as well as the elderly.

In terms of Communications:

• Respond around the clock to public, media and social media enquiries about the Central City in general and the work of the CCID
• Increasingly promote businesses, venues and events that contribute to and drive a vibrant daytime and nighttime economy, and
• Increasingly promote the work of the CCID through growing, targeted campaigns that speak directly to stakeholders who use the CBD for business or pleasure.

All of this, noted Evangelinos, was is in addition to the normal, day-to-day operational demands the

CCID currently already fulfils: “As I mentioned, though, we don’t do this on our own – we already have very important partners, but the secret will be in how we maximise those partnerships to the best of our collective ability that will enable us to drive our CBD forward into that 24-hour economy.”

CCID DEPARTMENTS: STATISTICAL HIGHLIGHTS

The following are some of the statistics achieved during the 2017-18 financial year, per department, as highlighted during the CCID’s AGM presentation.

Safety & Security

Urban Management

Social Development

Communications

The CCID’s full 2017-18 report can be accessed online here.

Image by Anita Reed