A MAJOR shakeup is now underway at the St. Lucia Tourist Board, (SLTB) which includes a financial audit, as the new batch of directors headed by marketing consultant Agnes Francis moves swiftly to transform the old entity into a new one to be called the St. Lucia Tourism Authority.
Staff, at a meeting Tuesday, were told to resign and reapply for positions in the new entity which is expected to be in operation April 1 of next year.
“A soft dissolving of the Tourist Board in now ongoing,” a source at the entity said.
Tourism Minister, Dominic Fedee Tuesday in Parliament confirmed the movement to a new entity is ongoing. “We have commenced work on the Tourism Authority,” he said.
The VOICE has learned that while the Tourist Board is still functioning it is doing so without its two top executives, namely Tourism Director, Louis Lewis and his deputy Tracy Warner-Arnold both of whom tendered in their resignations less than two weeks ago.
Our source confirmed that the departure of the two were hastened by the new board at Tuesday’s meeting.
“They were told to leave,” the source said.
Warner-Arnold’s departure, according to her resignation letter was to have come into effect at the end of this month. Lewis departure was due end of this year. Both are now out of the entity.
Reasons for their resignations are still not clear, with Warner-Arnold declining to comment when asked, and efforts to contact Lewis still unsuccessful.
Also unsuccessful were efforts to contact Francis. However the changes now taking place at the SLTB located in the Sureline Building at Vide Bouteille have not crippled any of its major programmes like the St. Lucia Triathlon, the Atlantic rally for Cruisers and others.
“Some programmes are still allowed to run despite what is happening at the board at this moment,” our source said.
Fedee at Tuesday’s sitting of the House of Assembly attempted to throw some light on what is presently going on at the Tourist Board by first explaining that the time had come for changes to take place at the entity.
He spoke of thousands of dollars being paid monthly to public relations firms as retainer fees in Canada and Brazil that were not benefiting St. Lucia at all; budgets not being prepared in advance; a precarious monetary situation where the Board pays out thousands of dollars in advertising paraphernalia and activities of little significance to the overall tourism product and $14 million being spent on the Arts and Jazz Festival that appeared not have the type of penetration in overseas markets as expected.
“We need to ask ourselves whether $14 million of $34 million (the Tourist Board’s annual budget) is worth spending on one of our events,” Fedee told the House of Assembly Tuesday.
“The time really has come for change. We are undertaking a financial audit of the St. Lucia Tourist Board with the Jazz Festival of particular concern,” he added. The festival has since been removed from the control of the Tourist Board and is now the portfolio of the Festivals Commission.
The change spoken of by Fedee also involves preparation of new tourism incentives legislation, along with legislation for the new entity that will replace the Tourist Board.
Other changes include the digitalization of immigration cards and other facilitation processes at the airports and the development of a four year plan for tourism so that all stakeholders could be singing from one document instead from scattered documents that more stymie growth in the tourism sector, Fedee said.
Another change is the establishment of a Tourism Development Agency with emphasis on advancing community tourism so that indigenous St. Lucians could have a stake in the product.
