The Linden IMC Town Week Committee plans to conduct rehabilitation works at the once thriving Bamia Creek, one of several projects it has earmarked for funding from the $4.8M it made from Town Week celebrations.
At a press briefing on Monday, Linden Mayor and Town Council IMC Chairman Orrin Gordon said there has been an increase in the celebratory activities as the committee has been preparing an agenda for one week for some time now, as opposed to one weekend when the programme first started.
Despite the number of challenges in pulling off this year’s programme, the committee earned $1.4M from stall rentals and $3.3M from sponsors with a small amount outstanding as commitments made by sponsors. Gordon said that their expenditure has amounted to $4.1M, not taking into account payments that are due to volunteers.
“This issue is not an issue of profit for the committee, whatever excess monies are left goes into projects and so our position is as much as we can have available those will be going straight into projects. Therefore at this juncture, if we [have a] further 1.2M all of that will be going into projects,” he said.
The committee commended sponsors Banks DIH, Bosai, Digicel, Ansa McAL, Bai-shan-Lin, Sterling Pro-ducts, Church’s Chicken, White Castle Fish Shop, Jac’s Hotel and Restaurant, Chicken Guinness Bar, Star Bonnet Hotel, Linden Elec-tricity Company Incorporat-ed, the Regional Democratic Council, Linden Fund USA and the Linden Dream Team (LDT).
“We are grateful to the Guyana Police Force who did a remarkable job dealing with crowd control and crowd management, the Department of Education, LTI and Guyana Fire Service, all who played a significant role,” Gordon said.
However, he noted that the committee was displeased that GT&T had reneged on its commitment last year and as such it did not approach the company for support for the Town Week 2012 activities. “Last year GT&T promise us 20 benches right now lying in GT&T compound,” Gordon said. He added that prior to 2011; the municipality had excellent relations with all the corporate supporters including GT&T; however, in 2011 there was a noticeable change in the relationship. “They agreed, after a lengthy discussion, to the benches and they give some phones to the best students for Linden. In 2012 we felt that that was really disrespectful over the years the kind of relationship, they never turn up for the handing over of the phones, total disrespect,” Gordon explained. Stabroek News attempts to verify this with the telephone company on Monday proved futile.
In addition, Gordon and IMC Councillor Winston Smith had expressed dissatisfaction at the level of support for most of the activities that were of a “soft” nature both in terms of patrons and media coverage. “We observe that NCN was not covering a lot of the activities that we had and more than anything else there were some activities in the view of the press that were soft activities and not one that carry glamour and so on. So we noted those were not carried in a big way except…… Our Speak Out Speak up programme we didn’t see that carried. NCN has development responsibilities to cover these events as often as possible.”
He also noted that there was little coverage of the Dream Team award ceremony and the Linden Fund USA Spelling Bee Competition, the senior citizens luncheon, bag packs give-away Linden Fund USA and Dream Team and the Linden Expo where only the president’s speech was covered.
As such he appealed to the press to give those activities some coverage in addition to the more glamorous events.
