Da­reece Po­lo

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­lo@guardian.co.tt

Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell and Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC) chair­man Win­ston “Gyp­sy” Pe­ters have both de­fend­ed the need for tax­pay­ers to fund Car­ni­val, agree­ing that fes­ti­vals help to fu­el the econ­o­my.

Mitchell and Pe­ters both spoke with Guardian Me­dia dur­ing sep­a­rate tele­phone in­ter­views on the heels of Wednes­day’s Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) in­to the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s (THA) ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The JSC re­vealed a $7 mil­lion loss for the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence and their Oc­to­ber Car­ni­val com­bined.

How­ev­er, events such as these have al­ways cost the State more than it could re­cov­er and agen­cies re­spon­si­ble for track­ing the spend­ing habits of lo­cals and tourists do not have up-to-date sta­tis­tics to prove their val­ue.

De­spite this, Mitchell, who said he could not speak on To­ba­go’s af­fairs, main­tained that fes­ti­vals were im­por­tant for the over­all ben­e­fit of var­i­ous cross-sec­tions of so­ci­ety.

“It’s not as sim­ple as you put out a cer­tain amount of mon­ey to hold sev­er­al events and you mea­sure the event by way of your tick­et re­ceipts or by way of your bar re­ceipts, etcetera. Be­cause the peo­ple com­ing to your fes­ti­val, they would have spent mon­ey for the plane tick­ets, they would have spent mon­ey for taxis, they may have rent­ed ve­hi­cles, they would have pur­chased their cloth­ing, they would go to make-up artists, they would do their nails. So, it’s not mea­sured in that very, very sim­plis­tic way,” Mitchell said.

Pe­ters went a bit fur­ther, not­ing that the NCC does not re­ceive a prof­it from its Car­ni­val ex­pens­es, point­ing in­stead to the ex­che­quer.

He said, “I don’t know in the To­ba­go’s House of As­sem­bly, you know, I don’t know what they do, but the mon­ey goes to the ex­che­quer. Gov­ern­ments make mon­ey from Car­ni­val based on the amount of peo­ple that come and how much mon­ey they spend, how much taxis they take, how much ho­tels they stay in, how much food they buy, how much ex­change we had.”

While the THA no longer in­tends to fund the To­ba­go Jazz Ex­pe­ri­ence, it is still prepar­ing for Car­ni­val in Oc­to­ber even as the study on last year’s event has not been peer re­viewed for pub­li­ca­tion.