The Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC) is ap­peal­ing to mas­quer­aders to be sen­si­tive to the al­lot­ted time they have to pa­rade on the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah stage. In an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, NCC chair­man Ken­ny De Sil­va said the NCC was sen­si­tive to the fact that this year would see an in­creased num­ber of mas­quer­aders and had met with the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Band­lead­ers As­so­ci­a­tion(NC­BA) to en­sure that band sec­tions go on and ex­it the stage in a time­ly man­ner.

De Sil­va said the NCC was hop­ing for a lev­el of com­pli­ance from mas­quer­aders. "Peo­ple are falling in love with the stage and have al­ready fall­en in love with it so the ex­cite­ment about it is ex­pect­ed but we have a high lev­el of op­ti­mism that band­lead­ers would stick with­in their al­lot­ted time. De Sil­va said this years Panora­ma semi­fi­nals could be an in­di­ca­tion of how move­ment on the stage would be, not­ing that steel­bands pro­ceed­ed across the stage in a more time­ly man­ner than pre­vi­ous years.

Pres­i­dent of NC­BA, David Lopez, ap­pealed to mas­quer­aders to keep in mind that all the bands need­ed to cross the stage and so they need­ed to stick with­in the time al­lot­ted to them to cross the stage. He ex­plained that all bands had been al­lot­ted time lim­its to cross the stage rang­ing from an hour and thir­ty min­utes for ex­tra large bands to five min­utes for mi­ni-bands.

He ad­mit­ted that there were go­ing to be se­ri­ous chal­lenges be­cause of lo­gis­ti­cal is­sues sur­round­ing the pa­rade, specif­i­cal­ly cit­ing the need to ac­com­mo­date for more mas­quer­aders as well as trucks on the road. Lopez said his or­gan­i­sa­tion was work­ing with all Car­ni­val stake­hold­ers to en­sure a suc­cess­ful Pa­rade of the Bands, in­clud­ing the NCC, po­lice and se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel.

He said there was lots of con­sul­ta­tion with Deputy may­or Keron Valen­tine to en­sure that mas on the road ran smooth­ly.