Tobago House of Assembly Secretary of Tourism, Culture, Antiquities & Transportation Tashia Burris says the money used to host the Tobago Carnival was at least $4 million under budget.
Burris made the announcement at news conference at the Shaw Park Cultural Complex yesterday.
“I don’t want to pre-empt our mathematicians in the Festivals Commission and TTAL (Tobago Tourism Agency Limited) but we will not spend, as I said, the $17.5 million. I think we would spend in the region of about 12, 13 million after we tabulate all the expenses,” she said.
She explained that one of the main reasons for this was that, “there were some elements of the budget that we weren’t able to execute this year, so that is where the cost savings, a lot of the cost savings, would be realised.”
She said the relevant agencies are currently tallying the figures and in about two weeks the final amount spent will be released.
Burris still defended what was spent, saying a large chunk was put toward marketing because it was the first large-scale event of its kind on the island.
“So, part of that spend was for the media launch, part of that spend was for Bago Jam and part of that spend was for other marketing elements,” she explained.
She also said the money spent on goods and services “skyrocketed” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The THA could have taken the decision to, because we want to save money, we would go with Trinidad suppliers who would obviously charge us less but I can tell you that as Secretary, the bulk of our spend was spent in Tobago and it went directly into the pockets of Tobago businessmen, Tobago entrepreneurs, because at the end of the day, for us there is no argument, there is no question; we will support our people first, we will support our locals first even if it meant we had to pay a little bit more for goods and services,” she said.
Burris also said the Tobago economy and people benefited tremendously because of the investments. She said, visitors “were injecting money directly into the economy of Tobago and into the pockets of people.”
In her view, Tobago had an excellent inaugural Carnival.
“All in all, most of the commentary that I’ve heard from visitors who have participated has been extremely positive and I want us to take that as a victory,” she said.
Bearing that in mind, she responded to Progressive Democratic Patriots leader Watson Duke, who described the Carnival as a failure and called on the THA to apologise to Tobagonians.
“I don’t have much to say about him or, except that I think that success speaks its own language,” she said.
However, she said there will be a post-mortem where the shortcoming will be identified and corrected.
In addition, she said they ran local surveys by polling visitors.
“And that information we would utilise to plan a bigger and better festival for our visitors next year,” Burris explained.
She also commended police and everyone involved for what she described as a crime and incident-free Carnival.
