There are plans for a To­ba­go Jazz Fes­ti­val this year, but Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine is hop­ing to re­vamp the event.

Au­gus­tine said the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s cur­rent han­dling of the event was not sus­tain­able.

“What this ad­min­is­tra­tion in­tends to do how­ev­er if we are to keep the Jazz fes­ti­val is to tran­si­tion so that pri­vate pro­mot­ers are the ones run­ning most of it and the THA per­haps just takes charge of the mar­ket­ing as­pect and the mar­ket­ing of the des­ti­na­tion but pri­vate pro­mot­ers get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to run with the events as op­posed to the THA do­ing the mar­ket­ing, bring­ing the artistes, pay­ing for all the events, pay­ing for all the lo­gis­tics. And pay­ing for every­thing, ze­ro to 100 per cent. That is not sus­tain­able,” said Au­gus­tine fol­low­ing the han­dover of the Man­ta Lodge Ho­tel in Spey­side on Wednes­day.

Au­gus­tine how­ev­er con­firmed that there had been al­lo­ca­tion for the event in the bud­get, and the Fes­ti­val Com­mis­sion was al­ready work­ing on plans for the event. How­ev­er, he could not state what had been fi­nalised just yet as there were still on­go­ing talks con­cern­ing the event.

“That an­nounce­ment will be made by the Fes­ti­val Com­mis­sion. I know that there are some plans and they have been plan­ning. The Fes­ti­val Com­mis­sion did point out to me that since 2020, they had some artistes that were al­ready locked in. Be­cause re­mem­ber we were about to have Jazz, and then COVID-19 came in and shut every­thing down. So there are some artistes that are al­ready locked in that they may have to fol­low through on con­trac­tu­al­ly,” said Au­gus­tine.

The Chief Sec­re­tary said he ex­pect­ed an an­nounce­ment to be made ear­ly in March, as he sus­pect­ed the com­mis­sion wished to wait un­til Car­ni­val end­ed to en­sure max­i­mum mar­ket­ing of the event.

“We need to tran­si­tion to a more sus­tain­able mod­el if we are to keep it. But one can­not de­ny that these are events that hap­pen so fre­quent­ly on the is­land that serve to in­ject the is­land with an ar­ti­fi­cial growth in our pop­u­la­tion for a pe­ri­od of time. Might be a week, might be two weeks,” said Au­gus­tine.