Carlis­ton “Ca­lyp­so Kerr” Kerr, the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion’s co­or­di­na­tor for Coun­ty Ca­roni is ap­peal­ing for re­gion­al Car­ni­val bod­ies to re­ceive full fund­ing to meet their bud­gets to en­sure suc­cess­ful events. He made the plea be­fore the start of Mon­day Night Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions host­ed by the Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Car­ni­val Com­mit­tee.

Kerr said re­gion­al bod­ies in Cen­tral were do­ing an ex­cel­lent job and could have achieved more if they had re­ceived their full bud­get from the NCC.

He said, “The peo­ple in Cen­tral, I think what they ask for is be­cause they re­alise the po­ten­tial that they are deal­ing with. If they set out to do ‘X’ and they get three quar­ters of ‘X’ or half of ‘X,’ they can on­ly do that much. When it’s time to crit­i­cise, every­body may want to crit­i­cise. If they pull off a mag­ic and get every­thing and every­thing goes well, every­body wants to jump on the train, they want to be part of that suc­cess­ful run­ning.”

He said time­ly in­vest­ment pre­vents big­ger prob­lems in the fu­ture. “It come like road con­struc­tion, if you need a road to go some­where, you don’t wait un­til lives are lost or cars get dam­age so you re­pair it on time, you save lives, you save time and you are look­ing at the next ten years down the line or even 20.”

Re­nee Bai­ley, chair­man of the CBCC, said the com­mit­tee was no­ti­fied at the last minute by the NCC of a 25 per­cent bud­get cut and had to “scram­ble” to se­cure funds from the pri­vate sec­tor. She said sev­er­al new bands par­tic­i­pat­ed in Kid­dies Car­ni­val and that the CBCC had reached out to var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties af­ter last year’s cel­e­bra­tions to boost par­tic­i­pa­tion.

Mon­day night’s event, en­ti­tled Echoes of An­ces­try, fea­tured a stick-fight­ing demon­stra­tion from the T&T Stick Fight­ing Cul­tur­al Group, per­for­mances by the Am­ri­tam Shak­ti Dancers, the Trop­i­cal An­gel Harps pan or­ches­tra, the Point Fortin Rhythm Sec­tion, and the Shoot­ing Stars Tas­sa Group.