Covid arrived very unexpectedly and increased the vulnerability of all sectors. One of those most heavily affected, is the tourism sector.

In the spirit of recovery and to direct ourselves to a better position than ‘yesterday’, we need to make changes and strengthen relationships between the private and public sectors as an inclusive collective.

Only with well-planned and effective solutions for the many challenges faced by small businesses within the Overberg, can we ensure the process of tourism recovery. Solutions can only be found through collaboration of the tourism industry in our towns.

This sentiment was reflected at the Overberg Tourism Capacity Building two-day workshop that started today, Wednesday, 12 October 2022 in Hermanus.

This is to remind the residents of Overstrand that Cllr Clinton Lerm, Mayco Member of Investment and Infrastructure, will hold a meeting on Monday, 17 October 2022 at 16:30 in the Hermanus Auditorium, to discuss how small businesses and households with approved Small Scale Embedded Generation (SSEG) installations can sell their surplus energy to the Municipality.

Through this program, consumers are given the opportunity to have a grid tied connection and feed all excess energy back into the municipal grid for which they are compensated at an approved annual tariff.

The meeting will be open to all small businesses and residential customers who have rooftop PV systems and are interested in selling excess energy to the Municipality.

Kindly note, discussions around Independent Power Producers (IPPs) who are interested in developing their own generation facilities will not be covered in this meeting.

The vaccination sites in the Overstrand for this week, 10 - 14 October 2022, are as follows:

Hermanus Community Day Centre (CDC) in Swartdam Road:
Tuesday and Thursday from 08:30 - 15:00

Kleinmond Proteadorp Community Hall:
Tuesday from 08:30 - 15:00

Gansbaai Pretorius Hall (NG Kerk):
Wednesday from 09:00 - 15:00

Stanford Clinic:
1st and 3rd Thursday of the month from 09:00 - 15:00

The Western Cape Department of Human Settlements is aware of a new housing scam doing the rounds requesting residents to pay for government housing assistance.

According to them, they recently became aware of a Facebook account, “RDP House Application 2022/2023”, where scammers pose as department officials facilitating approvals for houses, keys and title deeds.

A Cape Town resident was the most recent victim that discovered she was scammed after arriving at the Department’s office. In anticipating the receipt of a housing opportunity, she paid over R2 000 into a bank account to process her “approval letter” for a house in one of the Department’s projects in Mitchell’s Plain.

“This particular Facebook account is but one of many online housing scams preying on vulnerable residents.