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.