In a series of reportbacks on the work of the KRRA in 2024, we begin by catching up with John Cuthill, our environmental manager who is passionate about all things botanical.
The environment demands constant attention and members of the KRRA Exco and various friends, family and helpers are constantly working behind the scenes on various projects to keep up Kommetjie’s environmental integrity.
Eugenie Skelton and her small team expanded the Bokramspruit rehabilitation area, with a lot of work cleaning and planting fynbos. Eugenie is a fynbos fan, and residents will be used to seeing her constantly prowling the environs of Kom examining plants and plotting ways to re-green our communal spaces.
Bokramspruit is starting to look amazing, with the plants becoming well established after some challenges. Our esteemed leader Parick Dowling and his team kept an eye on alien emergence, and have been doing regular cleanups and cut downs of invasive alien bushes and trees.
The green belt had a follow-up sweep as did the area above the main road, and is also starting to look more like a maintenance job than a start from scratch mission.
Eugenie and John are also passionate members of a core group of residents who monitor the leopard toads to ensure they don't get hurt by humans in their migratory and breeding movements. This year was quite a slow year for the toads after a big few days early in the winter breeding season, when many toads were sighted. These dropped to very few, but this does seem to be an ebb and flow scenario with the toads.
A major highlight of 2024 was the handover of the environmental corridor that links the ‘north’ and ‘south’ areas of the Table Mountain National Park. This project has been more than a decade in the making, and after countless meetings, much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, Kommetjie is now officially surrounded by the national park.
We are busy trying to get clarity on how we can work with TMNP to rehabilitate the corridor, and what happens in terms of maintaining it.
Thanks to the few volunteers that keep up the environmental integrity of Kommetjie.
If you would like to assist in these and the many other projects undertaken by the KRRA volunteers, please consider a monthly or one-off EFT payment at details below, or via Snapscan here (Include your name and the code for the volunteer KRRA work you wish to support)
General 1, Parks and Open Spaces 2, Alien clearing 3, Beach Cleanup 4, Waterways Maintenance 5, Indigenous Planting 6, Walkways Maintenance 7, Traffic & Roads 8, Social Fabric 9, Development & Infrastructure 10, Media & Communications 11, Local Enterprise 12, Resilience 13
KRRA
Standard BankFish Hoek (036009)
Account number 374221065
Why?
The KRRA has existed for eight decades and is run by volunteers who work on issues from spatial planning, road safety, social fabric, resilience (disaster mitigation), and environmental integrity such as alien clearing, indigenous planting, beach cleanups, and the restoration of our rivers and wetlands. We get walkways fixed and look at better access. We monitor building and development, and put together alerts and updates via newsletter and social media. We deal with issues that benefit you.We would ask for some reciprocation financially (as well as ideas or volunteers) to enable the above work, which sometimes includes serious issues with legal fees attached. If every Kommetjie household donated just R50 a month (less than R2 per day), the KRRA would have a healthy enough budget to tackle almost anything thrown our way.
Contact Patrick Dowling on 084 966-1249 for additional information.
We follow legal procedure with monthly agendas and an AGM where a treasurer’s report is presented and we report back to the community.
We encourage Kom residents to attend the next AGM. You will be notified via email, social media and a banner as you enter Kom.
Be the difference.
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