School and water safety for South African kids

Thanks to the generosity of donors like you to this project, we were able to fund a new classroom Philippi Children's Centre (PCC) a couple years ago and we continue to fund scholarships for children to attend school. We wanted to provide you with the latest update for the Love to Langa Swimming Academy, which will not only benefit children at PCC, but the larger community as well. 

BPAS, an architectural company was hired to design the pool plans.  After each draft, the PCC management committee and Love to Langa had to approve.  When the drawings were completed in September 2015, the PCC committee gave its final approval and requested parking spaces be reduced in order to make the footprint smaller.

In October 2016, the plans were submitted to the planning offices in Athlone, Cape Town.  

The procedure was as follows:

Submission of plans and all documentation:

• Plans
• Property Deed
• Rates and Water Account
• Architect application
• SANS Documentation
• Power of Attorney

This followed a visit from planning to PCC in December to ensure that the architect took the correct measurements and all the structures on the plans were on site.  This was completed and the application was moved to Land Use Management (LUM.)

LUM requested the following:

• Plans
• Rates and Water Account (not older than 3 months)
• Property Deed
• Conveyancing Certificate (not older than 3 months)
• Swimming Pool Motivation Report
• Power of Attorney

After submission of the LUM documentation, a fee was paid.  This fee was for the request to decrease parking and for Advertising.  "Advertising" means visiting the neighbors to ensure there are not any objections to the build.  We are currently at this stage.  This is the longest stage.  Due to December and January being holidays, there is South African legislation that no advertising would take place from 12 December to 12 January.  We were informed that Advertising for the pool started on January 15, 2016.Once the LUM application has been passed, a scrutiny fee will be paid.  The application will then move to BDM (Building Development Management).  An engineer’s letter will be requested.  Once that has been approved, planning approval will be given to start the build.

We anticipate that if all goes according to plan and taking into consideration planning’s rules and regulations, we should be starting the build in the beginning of March 2016. Whew! It's been a long and complicated process, but we are so thrilled that the Love to Langa Swimming Academy is in our sights! 

Thanks again for your incredible support and we look forward to showing you photos of the building process shortly!