By STEVEN ZANDE –
ONLY 62,000 property owners are paying ground rates to the Lusaka City Council (LCC), leaving around 300,000 property owners eluding payments.
The LCC has devised a plan to seal all loopholes and capture the remaining property owners to help it improve service delivery.
Mayor Wilson Kalumba said most new structures had not been captured and this had made it difficult for the local authority to provide important services such as the collection of garbage and cleaning the city.
“Clearly, our portfolio is small. We need to increase it. That is why we are working to ensure that ground rates bring in a positive contribution to the council,” Mr Kalumba said.
He said this on Sunday when he featured on a Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) TV1 weekly programme ‘The Sunday Interview’.
He said ground rates were a major source of income for the local authority, hence the LCC would be implementing robust measures to ensure that property owners paid when the rates were due.
The LCC would further tighten operations of public facilities, including markets and bus stations in a bid to increase its revenue collection base.
He appealed to  stakeholders and traders in markets and bus stations to leave the responsibility to operate the facilities to the council.
Mr Kalumba said the council was targeting to renovate various markets around Lusaka to ensure the trading facilities conformed to modern standards.
He said there was need to upgrade the market infrastructure so that the facilities could have proper lighting systems, hygiene and security, and operate longer hours to meet the needs of the customers in the communities.
Mr Kalumba said this would further help reduce congestion in the Central Business District (CBD) as residents would purchase basic needs in their respective townships.