Of the $314 million allocated to the National Carnival Commission (NCC) for Carnival 2015, $150 million was used to pay off the commission’s debt incurred in staging last year’s festival. This was revealed by Arts and Multiculturalism Minister Lincoln Douglas yesterday while responding to questions from the media after a press conference at the NCC’s VIP booth, at the Queen’s Park Savannah.
The press conference was called by the Arts Ministry to update the country on Carnival preparations, but Douglas also took the opportunity to discuss Carnival funding and information reported by the T&T Guardian that the minister had been denied additional funding after his ministry made an error when calculating budget proposals.
Douglas, who had previously said he was never denied $43 million by Finance Minister Larry Howai, nor was there any oversight in respect to the budget, repeated his denials yesterday, despite confirmation by Howai which the T&T Guardian reported earlier this week.
Whereas, Douglas said, he had indeed broached the matter of additional funding with the Finance Ministry, this was nothing new and the additional funds requested were not for Carnival 2015 but for the development of the “overall carnival industry.” “The country has finite resources and after basic budget allocations, most ministries do not receive the total amount of money requested.
“This happens every year and subsequently ministries return to the minister of finance or the Cabinet for further developmental budgets,” Douglas said. He stressed that the additional money requested was not for Carnival 2015. However, both Douglas and NCC chairman Lorraine Pouchet made it clear the NCC needed additional funds for operational costs.
The NCC had made a budgetary request for TT $588,094,661 but received only about 53 per cent of this figure, or TT $314,135,369. The NCC’s accrued debt for 2015 of $150 million was paid out of the budgeted allocation leaving just over $160 million for this year’s Carnival. The Government, in 2013, gave the NCC $175 million to eliminate debt the commission had at the time.
Douglas said the application to the Ministry of Finance had to do with the repaying of loans that were taken by the NCC in previous years to meet the shortfall in carnival expenditure. Pouchet said that the NCC had no major outstanding debts.
“We aren’t debt-strapped, we don’t owe anybody really, but what we do know is that we have an issue where we need to get additional funding to ensure that the NCC can continue to operate for the entire year and to the next budget and so that we could also satisfy the demands of the stakeholders within the carnival and cultural fraternity,” Pouchet said.