Artist Coali­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ACTT) has pre­sent­ed Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar with its "cul­tur­al sec­tor mas­ter plan" for next week's bud­get. The group said it met with gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, Stephen Cadiz and Win­ston Pe­ters, "to get a re­form of a sec­tor that world­wide is one of the biggest earn­ers of rev­enue."

In a state­ment, ACTT said T&T's arts and cul­ture sec­tor had not been prop­er­ly man­aged by "suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions."

ACTT met with Per­sad-Bisses­sar on Au­gust 27 with the fi­nal fig­ures of its plan. Ac­cord­ing to Rubadiri Vic­tor, in­ter­im pres­i­dent of ACTT, the group was pre­vi­ous­ly told by Per­sad-Bisses­sar "to pri­ori­tise and come back with com­pet­i­tive fig­ures." "We were told by the Ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter that she liked what she saw in the pre­sen­ta­tion, but that the coun­try's fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion would not al­low the Gov­ern­ment to en­gage all the pro­grammes," he said. Com­ment­ing on the plan, Vic­tor said: "The 2010 bud­get is about the cre­ation of an en­abling en­vi­ron­ment for the cul­tur­al sec­tor which has ex­ist­ed too long with­out com­mon-sense in­dus­tri­al mech­a­nisms."

He added that plans out­lined in the doc­u­ment would cre­ate a re­al and vi­brant cul­tur­al sec­tor that can mul­ti­ply its con­tri­bu­tions to the na­tion­al econ­o­my sig­nif­i­cant­ly in three years.