Key dates

RedHotPupUpYoga 1st September 7am and 8:30am @ Verity Park.  Bring your mat and your fur baby, for a free pet friendly yoga session.

Jazz on the Lake on Sun 2 September 2018. It won’t affect Parkhurst directly, but there will be the usual road closures on the day along Chester/Bolton/Oxford Rds.

Annual Spruit Day on 15 September 2018. Meet the team at the 10th street Bridge, corner 5th Avenue from 08:30. We are celebrating a newly cleared area. Bring hats, water, wellies and picnic blankets. Coffee and plastic bags will be available.  If you would like to get more involved, please email Jacques Hough (environment@parkhurstvillage.com) or Natalie Zimmelman (natalie@parkhurstvillage.com), otherwise we look forward to seeing you there

Pensioner Rates Rebates Extension Period until 30 September 2018. The city is allowing residents who qualify for a pensioner’s rebate to still apply by the end of September. Once processed, your rates payments will be backdated to 1 July. If you miss this deadline, you will only receive the rebate in the month following your application. You can download the forms here: . Completed forms should be taken to the Randburg Revenue Centre, cnr Jan Smuts Ave and Bram Fischer Dr

PRABOA AGM on 11 October 2018. Where: MOTH Hall, cnr 16th St and 2nd Ave. When: 18:30pm.

Environment

 PRABOA has adopted Verity Park and is in the process of doing the same for the 5th Avenue Park. Please see our letter to the Authorities regarding the 5th Avenue Park bridge here with thanks to Chris Diamond (legal@parkhurstvillage.com). We are also planning a street and spruit clean up initiative

An A Re Sebatseng (Lets work together) cleanup initiative took place in the 21st street Park on 21 July. Even though this park looks relatively clean, approximately 15 bags full of litter has been collected (particularly on the banks of the stream). Community involvement is critical for these initiatives to make a sustainable impact – please contact Jacques Hough at environment@parkhurstvillage.com to get involved!

Safety

Since our July 2018 newsletter:

• We had a very successful domestic staff training session. The purpose was for Cortac to highlight to your home staff what to look out for and how to react when a security incident happens, especially when the home-owner is not at home. It was a very interactive session, with numerous questions from your loyal staff, many thanks for the residents who arranged for their staff to attend.
• We also launched an additional vehicle in Parkhurst, operating as a strike vehicle focussing on crime hotspot areas and times. Operations by this vehicle will be updated as crime trends change over time.
• We are often asked what services do we offer and why should residents support our security solution versus other security companies:
  • We have 3 vehicles patrolling Parkhurst and Parktown 24 hours of the day; a strike vehicle in operation; all with 2 highly trained and experienced, well-armed guards; a number of cameras at crime hotspots; as well as a roaming camera in one of our vehicles; the occasional placement of Cortac guards and undercover guards at crime hotspots; and an active area manager.
  • Cortac’s Control Room has a dedicated Medi-Response team on call 24 hours a day to attend to all medical emergencies. Teams of highly experienced and skilled paramedics and medics, in high-speed response vehicles & ambulances, are able to provide quick emergency medical response with no call-out fees.
  • Cortac also, upon request from subscribers, provide a meet and greet service to ensure a safe arrival at one’s place of residence.
  • Pro-active security solutions such as SafeParks/ Parksec with one security provider (Cortac) have by far the best chance to control crime in our neighbourhood. But then it needs the residents to sign up.
• Compare this to the re-active security services offered by others:
  • Mostly one guard in the vehicle, only occasional patrols a few times a day and not actively patrolling in order to save operating costs, focussing only on home alarm monitoring, etc.
  • This allows these companies to often offer a cheaper service contract or specials to you, but you need to ask yourself, is safety/ security something where you should go for the cheapest solution and also; what is the value of your family’s lives?

Built environment and heritage

Please get in touch with Greg Hirschson (heritage@parkhurstvillage.com) or Catherine Grainger (architecture@parkhurstvillage.com) on these issues.

Parkhurst Primary

We are in the process of raising funds to repair and upgrade the infants department and classrooms at Parkhurst Primary through a program called “Fund a Class”. To improve educational outcomes we are also gathering volunteers to assist with extra maths lessons at the school. We are also open to any suggestions to help improve the school and quality of education provided at Parkhurst Primary. To get involved, please contact Kundayi Munzara (kundayi@parkhurstvillage.com).

Internet

There have been a number of complaints about Vumatel over the past few months, and so we asked Vumatel what their plans for improving service levels in Parkhurst are. Vumatel responded as follows:

“Vumatel is currently experiencing some challenges in the Parkhurst area due to high uptake. The local data centre which supports the suburb is almost full which makes provisioning new installations, and supporting existing clients a bit challenging. Vumatel, however, has plans to upgrade the data centre later this year to resolve this issue. The Vumatel network in Parkhurst has been going strong for almost 4 years now since piloting FTTH in the suburb. Vumatel will be scheduling preventative maintenance and upgrades in the area in the near future to make sure that it can continue to offer the suburb of Parkhurst a world-class fibre broadband experience. Residents can expect some downtime when the maintenance and upgrades take place, but this will be communicated in advance.”

If you don’t manage to get sufficient support from your ISP please email social@vumatel.co.za or tag Albertina Miya on the I Love Parkhurst secret group on Facebook. You can also email Ryan Hawthorne (technical@parkhurstvillage.com ). We are currently looking for solutions for member management and community interaction for PRABOA / SafeParks / Parksec. Please get in touch with Ryan if you have any ideas on this.

Call for volunteers

PRABOA could use your help! Please get in touch and let us know what you are interested in. We need a car guard solution for homeless people, for example. We could use help on our website and with communications. We can help put you in touch with Incredible Edible Parkhurst if you are interested. We could really use help with our website, communication and marketing particularly SafeParks/Parksec. Do you want to help set up the Village Fair? Please let us know! Please get in touch with Cheryl Labuschagne (chair@parkhurstvillage.com) to volunteer.