3.1 Introduction
The City of Johannesburg is designated a metropolitan municipality with an executive mayoral system, in terms of the Municipal Structures Act. It has a total of 217 councillors, made up of 109 ward councillors and 108 councillors elected in terms of a party list system (also known as PR councillors). The political head of the council is the executive mayor, who presides over a ten person mayoral committee. Each member of the mayoral committee has been allocated an executive portfolio and chairs a portfolio committee, made up of councillors drawn from all political parties. Individual ward councillors will also be responsible for setting up and chairing a local ward committee, made up of representatives of civil society.
A City Manager, along with executive directors for planning, community development, finance, municipal administration and contract management, heads the city's central administration. The heads of the Metropolitan Police Department, emergency management services, and arts, culture and heritage services will also report directly to the City Manager. The administration has been decentralised into eleven administrative regions, which will be operationally responsible for the delivery of health, housing, sport and recreation, libraries, social development, and other local community-based services.
Entities have been established for a number of services. Water and sanitation, electricity and solid waste management will be run by service utilities. Roads and storm-water services will be provided by the Johannesburg Roads Agency and the provision of parks and cemeteries by City Parks Johannesburg. The council has also set up separate companies for its fresh produce market, the Johannesburg Zoo, the Civic Theatre, and Metrobus.
3.2 The organisational design
| The Organisational Design Principles for the Administration
· Attaining affordable and realistic structures, |
There is also an increased focus on defining specific roles more clearly, such as the separation of strategic/non-strategic roles, client/contractor roles, and policy/operations roles. This allows individuals to take responsibility for their tasks and then to be held accountable for the carrying out of these tasks.
While council is no longer directly responsible for the delivery of certain services, it is still ultimately accountable to meet its constitutional mandate to ensure the residents of Johannesburg obtain access to good quality, affordable services on a sustained basis. To this end, council's primary responsibility is to perform the "client" function, directly through the management of contractual arrangements for service delivery, ie the activities of the "contractor", and more broadly by policy development and through the regulation of the environment. The central administration represents the client in that it will determine what council wants from each service and contracts this out to a specific body, the contractor, such as a utility, entity, or the corporatised entities.
It is significant that regions are no longer seen as part of the core administration but instead also take on a role as contractors to the central administration. This is appropriate, as the regions are responsible for a number of functions requiring localised implementation, such as libraries and health services. The delivery of these services is not dissimilar to the delivery of services through the UACs, such as water and sanitation through a utility.
In addition centralised contractors will deliver planning, heritage services, emergency management services and metropolitan police services.
The administration is divided into three structures:
- A central administration - the head office - that will be responsible for policy, regulation and co-ordination
- Central distribution functions that will carry out both policy and operations across the city, and
- Administrative regions that will be responsible for region specific operations.
At a broad level the administration is no longer structured in a generic way, comprising a number of departments, but is structured around the specific functions the organisation is responsible for, eg the need to provide policy, regulation and co-ordination defines the way the central administration is structured. This structure is reflected in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. The Design of the New Administration
3.3 The central administration
The central administration is based around the office of the City Manager, which will be responsible for contract management, finance, municipal administration (corporate support services) and community development.
The new design of the core administration represents a radical departure from that of the previous administration and indeed from the design of other municipal administrations in South Africa. This is a much smaller and more focused organisation than existed previously and incorporates only those functions critical to the formulation of policy, the regulation of contracts and the co-ordination and management of service delivery.
By focusing on core functions, the design optimises efficiency and allows exclusive focus on these functions.
By clearly placing the City Manager at the head of the administration, the design also ensures that the executive mayor and the council are able to hold the City Manager and the City Manager's office accountable for successfully co-ordinating contract management, finance, corporate support services and community development. The role and responsibilities of each function is described in detail in Section 10.
i. Office of the City Manager
The City Manager is the overall administrative head of the unicity. The City Manager is answerable to the council and the executive mayor in particular. The Office of the City Manager contains a set of functions of a corporate and strategic nature ie internal audit, communications, information technology and strategic support services.
ii. Contract Management (CMU)
With the establishment of utilities, agencies and corporatised entities (UACs), council established a contract management unit. The following three roles describe the activities of the unit:
- Ensuring that the UACs evolve to become effective and viable service providers within the framework of council's strategic and development objectives and against the background of user expectations
- Ensuring that the UACs function within the bounds of their contracts and in terms of the spirit of the Service Delivery Agreements
- Ensuring that information is systematically collected and processed to enable benchmarking, monitoring, management intervention and reporting.
The main driving force that will give impetus to, and govern the activities of, the UACs will be the Service Delivery Agreement (SDA) and Sale of Business Agreement (SoBA). The SDAs will form the basis for the CMU to give effect to the three main roles described above. The SDAs will require ongoing development, refinement and revision such that all parties remain abreast of the commercial, technical, regulatory and service provisions required by the market place. This includes:
- Development of SDAs by applying inputs from council (development objectives, business and financial planning processes), UACs (viability, operating conditions, transitionary arrangements) and end users (service delivery key performance indicators)
- Refinement and testing of SDAs which must be an ongoing process, using benchmarks, KPIs and business/user intelligence
- Compliance in terms of SDAs by tracking performance according to contractual undertakings. SDA revisions will be needed if categories of compliance are found to be superfluous, or if key aspects of compliance are found to be inadequately handled by existing SDAs
- Dynamic and iterative reviews of the SDAs will be essential at least in the short- to medium term.
iii. Finance
Within the new central administration, finance will be retained as a single function. This will ensure that it is not subsumed within a broader corporate support function. This is particularly important to avoid similar problems to those leading to the financial crisis in 1997. The finance function comprises corporate planning, the office of the budget, expenditure, revenue and support services.
A key responsibility will be the strategic planning focus of the organisation, specifically responsibility for sustaining the city development strategy and plan.
iv. Municipal Administration
Municipal Administration includes human resources management, corporate support and administration, corporate GIS, facility management and maintenance, legal services, valuation services and occupational health and safety.
v. Community Development
This function contains policy, regulation and standards for community services such as sport and recreation, health, libraries, social development and housing, certain centralised operations, and a secretariat.
The above functions can be viewed as 'public goods' which are important services to boost social capital in the city, but services that cannot be supported on user charges alone.
3.4 Central distribution functions
A number of central distribution functions have been formed. It includes planning, emergency management services, metropolitan police services and arts, culture and heritage services.
Each of the functions has been centralised and will be 'contracted' to perform a certain function. This ensures that the different services, such as metropolitan policing or emergency services, are able to focus on the development of its own specialised service delivery.
As with other 'contractors', the central administration will also be able to hold each of these units accountable for the successful delivery of its respective service.
i. Planning
Urban planning is best co-ordinated by a central body to ensure that resources are used optimally. Urban planning comprises four main functions: development planning, environmental management, transportation planning and technical support and project planning.
ii. Emergency Management Services
The management of emergency management services is divided into operations, transport management and communications. It is responsible for the management of fire, ambulance, rescue and disaster management services.
iii. Metropolitan Police Department
The Metropolitan Police Department is a new function within the unicity. It incorporates traffic law enforcement and by-law enforcement. It is structured into central operations, precincts, support services and a metro police academy.
iv. Arts, Culture and Heritage Services
The provision of heritage services includes responsibility for museums, galleries, arts and culture, heritage sites and support. These services have historically been unequally distributed.
3.5 Administrative Regions
Greater Johannesburg is divided into eleven administrative regions. The administrative regions, however, do not have the responsibility for primary functions that the previous four substructures had.
| The administrative regions will act as decentralised service delivery units and they will bring about:
· Enhanced visible service delivery; |
Each of the eleven administrative regions will be 'contracted' to the central administration (the 'client') and will be held accountable to the central administration to meet the service needs of the respective region.
Their closeness to communities enables administrative regions to be more responsive to differing local needs. This will be ensured through a number of mechanisms which will enhance public participation such as the new People's Centres and improved ward councillor support.
Their status as 'independent contractors' will furthermore give administrative regions the ability to become more flexible and innovative in the way they deliver services. For example, the needs in a high-income commercial centre such as the Sandton CBD area, will be very different to the needs of a low-income area such as Orange Farm. The regional administration must assess the needs of their particular area and, when necessary, change the way services is delivered to suit these needs.
Over time, successful service delivery and increased local ownership of processes within each region could lead to the development of a unique identity for each region.