Sascha?Wil­son

An on­line cam­paign has been launched in de­fence of May­or Ray­mond Tim Kee, who is ex­pect­ed to step down dur­ing a spe­cial sit­ting of the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion to­day.

The on­line pe­ti­tion on Face­book is be­ing spear­head­ed by Roger Ra­jan who is try­ing to get 500 sig­na­tures in sup­port of his call for Tim Kee to re­con­sid­er his res­ig­na­tion. At 4.10 pm yes­ter­day there were 263 sig­na­tures on the pe­ti­tion, far less than the 10,000 gath­ered for an­oth­er on­line pe­ti­tion last week call­ing for his re­moval.

Ra­jan said: "We be­lieve that the May­or as a pub­lic fig­ure sim­ply of­fered words of con­cern that the gen­er­al pub­lic has com­ment­ed about in the past."Sup­port for Tim Kee al­so came from Na­dine Bar­bara Smith, who said she was his step­daugh­ter. On her Face­book page yes­ter­day, Smith post­ed a state­ment in his de­fence along with a video of a two minute in­ter­view with him.

"I would just like to say it re­al­ly hurts me to see that he has made the de­ci­sion to re­sign, and to every­one who had any evil or hurt­ful thing to say to Mr. Tim Kee, you are worse than any­thing he has ever said."

Smith added: "Yes, he could have said noth­ing. Yes, he could have been more sen­si­tive to­ward the is­sue but he was not, and I do not find any­thing wrong in what he had to say."

Tim Kee al­so seemed to be hav­ing a change of heart yes­ter­day as he re­leased an open let­ter to the pub­lic in which he said he still has work to com­plete and is not will­ing to give up.

"I have seen the protests. I have re­ceived the mes­sages. I un­der­stand the is­sues at hand and would like to find a so­lu­tion," he wrote.

"When I be­came May­or of Port of Spain, it is be­cause I had a vi­sion to take the city for­ward, to con­tin­ue and im­prove on the work of the per­sons be­fore me. I still have more work to do this year and I am not will­ing to give up. I have al­ways had an open door pol­i­cy and am al­ways open to di­a­logue. What I am not open to is cru­ci­fix­ion with­out mu­tu­al re­spect and un­der­stand­ing and hope to move for­ward."

Tim Kee, who has faced a ma­jor pub­lic out­cry via so­cial me­dia, as well as a protest out­side his of­fice over his com­ments fol­low­ing the death of Japan­ese pan play­er Asi­ma Na­gakiya, said his state­ments about vul­gar­i­ty "were made in iso­la­tion when asked about safe­ty, a week pri­or to the trag­ic in­ci­dent."

"Should I have ad­mon­ished the be­hav­iour of these preda­tors in my state­ment? Ab­solute­ly. And I humbly apol­o­gise for not do­ing so, but the prob­lem of rapists, thieves and abusers is a big­ger fight, and less about pre­ven­tion via cau­tion and more about find­ing a cure for the en­vi­ron­ments that spawn and nur­ture them. In a speech about car­ni­val safe­ty the for­mer mes­sage was eas­i­er to dis­sem­i­nate and I re­gret not al­so in­clud­ing a warn­ing to would-be per­pe­tra­tors that their ac­tions would not be tol­er­at­ed by the armed forces."

Tim Kee said the way the state­ment was linked to the death of Japan­ese pan play­er Asa­mi Na­gakiya was "both reck­less and vi­cious on the part of a par­tic­u­lar me­dia house, in what I can on­ly con­ceive to be an at­tempt to drum up con­tro­ver­sy."