Renu­ka Singh

Gov­ern­ment is look­ing to mon­e­tise the fa­cil­i­ties at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (NA­PA), and its sis­ter, the South Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (SAPA) and is chang­ing the man­age­ment struc­ture to help ac­com­plish that goal.

The Gov­ern­ment is propos­ing a struc­ture sim­i­lar to that of Queen's Hall and Na­pari­ma Bowl where the en­tire fa­cil­i­ty is man­aged by a sin­gle board.

The is­sue came up for de­bate on Tues­day dur­ing the Sen­ate ses­sion on the NA­PA Bill 2021 and Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell said that in 2013, the then Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment al­tered the line man­age­ment and sub­sumed it un­der the Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Mith­cell said that at that time the for­mer Gov­ern­ment en­tered in­to a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing with two min­istries to han­dle dif­fer­ent as­pects of the NA­PA.

"It is no sur­prise that such a con­vo­lut­ed and in­ef­fec­tive mod­el of man­age­ment of the NA­PA com­plex by over­ly bu­reau­crat­ic or­gan­i­sa­tions, sub­ject to strict pub­lic sec­tor rules and guide­lines re­sult­ed in poor main­te­nance, poor man­age­ment and poor de­ci­sion mak­ing," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said it was the PP that failed to "prop­er­ly main­tain the fa­cil­i­ty."

The NA­PA was closed in 2014 for re­me­di­al works and re­opened in 2016. The State's project man­age­ment com­pa­ny, the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T (Ude­cott) cur­rent­ly han­dles the main­te­nance of the build­ing.

The man­age­ment mod­el, Mitchell said, added a lay­er of bu­reau­cra­cy to the op­er­a­tions which made it hard to have book­ings, utilise rev­enue, buy book­ings or get fund­ing.

Mitchell said it was not just the NA­PA fa­cil­i­ty, as the ad­join­ing ho­tel was al­so un­der-utilised.

Dur­ing the course of the pan­dem­ic, the Gov­ern­ment set aside the NA­PA ho­tel for doc­tors se­nior med­ical staff who need­ed to rest be­fore con­tin­u­ing to work at the hos­pi­tals.

Mitchell said the ho­tel was with­out prop­er man­age­ment, no op­er­a­tor and no le­gal rep­re­sen­ta­tive on be­half of the State.

"The es­tab­lish­ment of a board at NA­PA will al­low for faster and im­proved de­ci­sion mak­ing, greater ease of do­ing busi­ness and its com­mer­cial ac­tiv­i­ties," he said.

The pro­posed Board will com­prise per­sons with rel­e­vant ex­per­tise and knowl­edge in the per­form­ing arts, cul­ture, law, man­age­ment, fi­nance, Hu­man Re­sources and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy.

In an im­me­di­ate re­but­tal, Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Sen­a­tor Wade Mark slammed the Gov­ern­ment for the lag­ging con­sul­ta­tions on this mat­ter.

"There is no com­mit­ment, no in­for­ma­tion shar­ing as it re­lates to the play­ers in­volved in this in­dus­try be­ing di­rect­ly in­volved in con­sul­ta­tion par­tic­i­pa­tion in this de­ci­sion-mak­ing process," he said.

"I would like to say how dis­ap­point­ed we are," he said.

Mark called Mitchell to at least have the Bill sent to the Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee to get the weigh-in from the stake­hold­ers.

Mark said that while Mitchell paint­ed a com­pet­i­tive pic­ture of the changeover of NA­PA, he did not agree that it would work.

"This NA­PA lit­er­al­ly was de­signed to fail," Mark said.

"There are on­ly two ma­jor rooms in that build­ing that can be mon­e­tised that could gen­er­ate in­come," he said. One room is the au­di­to­ri­um and the oth­er, mark said, still need­ed to be out­fit­ted.

"It was nev­er built for pur­pose, it is an ir­rel­e­vant struc­ture," Mark said.