without negotiations and with the existing councillors retained in office. In May 1996 elections were held for all the TLCs. At the time of these elections the South Cape District Council was established in place of the South Cape RSC, and transitional representative councils (TRCs) were elected to represent rural areas outside the TLCs on the District Council. The area that was to become Knysna Municipality included part of the Outeniqua TRC. At the local elections of December 2000 the TLCs and TRCs were dissolved and the Knysna Municipality was established as a single local authority. At the same election the South Cape District Council was dissolved and replaced by the Eden District Municipality. In 2011 the Hoogekraal Plantation area north of Sedgefield was transferred from George Municipality to Knysna Municipality. Politics The municipal council consists of twenty-one members elected by mixed-member proportional representation. Eleven councillors are elected by first-past-the-post voting in eleven wards, while the remaining ten are chosen from party lists so that the total number of party representatives is proportional to the number of votes received. In the election of 1 November 2021 no party obtained a majority of seats on the council. The Democratic Alliance (DA) then formed a minority coalition government with the Knysna Independent Movement (KIM). At the first council meeting on 22 November 2021, the DA's Julie Lopes was elected speaker, followed by the DA's Levael Davis as mayor and Mark Willemse from KIM as deputy mayor with the help of the lone councillor from the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The following table shows the results of the 2021 election. History Joy Cole was first elected mayor under the DA in December 2000 but defected in the September 2004 floor-crossing to become an ANC-aligned independent and reconstituted the council under ANC control. Cole formed a broad-based coalition of the ANC and DA after the March 2006 local government elections when neither party had obtained an outright majority. After Cole resigned in December 2006 to pursue another career, Doris Wakeford-Brown of the DA formed a multi-party coalition. This short-lived coalition collapsed in May 2007 when the Knysna Civic Alliance switched allegiances to the ANC, which brought Eleanore Bouw-Spies in as the new mayor. In the September 2007 floor crossing window the two civic party councillors defected to the ANC, giving the party an outright majority of 9 seats out of 16. Bouw-Spies' term as