KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

With the sun set­ting on his stint as may­or, Ab­don Ma­son re­called the days of trav­el­ling in the Point Fortin Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion’s of­fi­cial ve­hi­cle, pray­ing that it does not stall due to a lack of gas.
In one of his last en­gage­ments, Ma­son strolled in­to the Town Hall au­di­to­ri­um to Frank Sina­tra’s I Did It My Way, say­ing this was how he car­ried out his tenure be­tween 2016 un­til now.

He was ad­dress­ing an au­di­ence at Wednes­day’s cer­e­mo­ny to ho­n­our home­town he­roes; so­ca star Fay-Ann Lyons Al­varez, ASP Roger Alexan­der and Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion chair­man Paul Lea­cock.
While he did not com­plain about fund­ing for the cor­po­ra­tion, he re­called not hav­ing mon­ey to fill up the may­or’s of­fi­cial ve­hi­cle.

 “Go­ing up the road with a cor­po­ra­tion ve­hi­cle, the of­fi­cial ve­hi­cle, with the gas light on. We are go­ing to a gas sta­tion and the card has no mon­ey on it and some­times I have no mon­ey in my pock­et. So Mark and Free­man would use what mon­ey they have on them and put the gas in the ve­hi­cle. Some­times we coura­geous­ly come down the high­way with the light on and we say don’t take any back road be­cause if the car shuts down, we don’t want to be on no back road so shut down on the main road. We al­ways make it back here to God be the glo­ry,” Ma­son said.

De­spite not be­ing cho­sen to con­test an elec­toral dis­trict in the De­cem­ber 2 Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions, Ma­son vowed to leave on a bet­ter note than his pre­de­ces­sor.

He said that usu­al­ly when there is a new may­or, the may­oral chains are usu­al­ly hand­ed over.

But this was not the case in 2016.
“When I be­came the may­or of Point Fortin, I think I en­tered it on some­what of a dis­re­spect­ful note, in that your pre­de­ces­sor is sup­posed to say thank you for the time shared and pass on the chains. This (chain) is not mine and I thank God that I had this op­por­tu­ni­ty. I pledge to the per­son who re­places me, once God bless­es me with life, health and strength, I will gra­cious­ly at­tend that func­tion and hand over the chain,” he said.

While say­ing thanks to his staff and coun­cil for serv­ing with him, he al­so took the time to apol­o­gise for any in­dis­cre­tion. He was al­so thank­ful that his moth­er saw him rise to the first cit­i­zen of the Bor­ough be­fore pass­ing away on Sep­tem­ber 13.
“I think I went out there and I made a tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tion with­out boast­ing be­cause I didn’t do it alone. I did it with a team of peo­ple who ac­cept­ed a call to re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. They gird­ed their loins, they ap­plied them­selves to the task and we came out suc­cess­ful. We did it our way,” he said