Af­ter an­oth­er Car­ni­val clean up, the Wood­brook Res­i­dents’ As­so­ci­a­tion is call­ing for a ban on paint dur­ing J’Ou­vert cel­e­bra­tions.

Pres­i­dent of the as­so­ci­a­tion Lynette Dol­ly likened the paint to a weapon, in call­ing for the ban dur­ing an in­ter­view on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew on Ash Wednes­day.

“The band­lead­ers have stat­ed that they can­not con­trol their mem­bers with all the paint. So if you can­not con­trol your mem­bers, paint is a weapon, ban paint. This is what we are say­ing,” said Dol­ly.

“The po­lice can­not con­trol it. The Port-of-Spain cor­po­ra­tion can­not con­trol it. The NCC can­not con­trol it, the band­lead­ers can­not con­trol it, well ban it. It’s a weapon.”

The dam­age done to Wood­brook prop­er­ties dur­ing J’Ou­vert cel­e­bra­tions came in­to fo­cus af­ter im­ages of Tra­garete Road cov­ered in pink, due to the spread of abir pow­der, emerged on so­cial me­dia.

Sev­er­al hous­es in Wood­brook al­so had paint stains on their walls, an is­sue which has been plagu­ing res­i­dents for years.

How­ev­er, most walls on res­i­den­tial streets ap­peared most­ly clean, in­clud­ing Tra­garete Road, when Guardian vis­it­ed the area, due to a com­bi­na­tion of pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures, clean­ing or an ad­just­ed route which was agreed be­tween band­lead­ers and the NCC for the 2020 sea­son.

Dol­ly said, how­ev­er, some build­ings that weren’t on the agreed route were al­so de­faced.

“I’m not too sure that the route worked out too well be­cause War­ren Street is not a route and you should see the build­ings on War­ren Street, St There­sa’s church with all the paint. I mean it is re­al­ly ridicu­lous,” she said.

Dur­ing the Down­town Car­ni­val re­sults press con­fer­ence, Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez ad­mit­ted he had placed trust in the band­lead­ers to reg­u­late their mem­bers, but this back­fired.

“We met with them at NCC’s of­fice and they gave us the as­sur­ance that they were go­ing to cur­tail, they were go­ing to mon­i­tor and they were go­ing to en­sure. The thing is they didn’t mon­i­tor, they didn’t en­sure and they didn’t cur­tail. We got it full blast again. That tells me that they are high­ly ir­re­spon­si­ble and they didn’t care whether they were dis­rup­tive in that re­gard or they af­fect­ed peo­ple’s pri­vate prop­er­ty,” said Mar­tinez. “We gonna have to look at the sit­u­a­tion a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly. I have spo­ken al­ready with the chair­man of the pa­rade of bands for NCC this morn­ing and we are gonna have to have some se­ri­ous meet­ings as to how we go­ing to man­age this process and man­ag­ing the bands on that par­tic­u­lar day.”

Mar­tinez, how­ev­er, down­played the idea of ban­ning paint al­to­geth­er.

“We may not have to ban the paint be­cause we don’t want to dis­cour­age them from us­ing it. But we don’t want you to de­face prop­er­ty so maybe we may have to im­pose a fine on the bands,” he said.

The may­or said one pos­si­bil­i­ty may be the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a se­cu­ri­ty bond or fine for the bands which may be at­tached to their reg­is­tra­tion.