THE Urban Council has been getting a lot of flak from the media as well as the community for the way it has been spending or planning to spend money on 'educational trips abroad'.
It is certainly a healthy situation that councillors can now be openly challenged for their actions when in the past councillors acted without consultation.
However, let us not err in the wrong direction. Sometimes when we are told things, the teller of the tale has an axe to grind.
The Democratic Party members of the Urban Council certainly sounded very noble when they told the press that they were against the council's 1995-96 annual study visit to North American because they could not support such extravagance. Do councillors need to travel abroad to better serve the community? The answer determines whether the trip is a junket or a duty visit. The Urban Council is in the process of drawing up its five-year plan for arts and culture and one would think that a visit abroad would convince the councillors that: Money spent on the arts is a long-term investment for the welfare of the country.
Arts management is different from government administration. There is no doubt that when it comes to investing in the arts, councillors are tight-fisted.
A trip abroad would convince them that quality does not come cheap and that investment in the arts is needed if the quality of the arts is to be improved in terms of building arts facilities and programming events for these facilities.