THE EDITOR: Let's say one day you decided to head to the grocery to buy a pack of pink salmon for $75. However, like the poet Ataklan said, there was a flood on the main road, which caused you to go back home with your $75 but no salmon. Would you say you realised a cost saving of $75? Of course not.

Now consider the Tobago House of Assembly (THA)'s Tourism Secretary's boast that the assembly realised cost savings of approximately $3 or $4 million primarily because 'there were some elements of the carnival budget we were unable to execute this year.' Is this really cost saving?

Someone needs to tell the Tourism Secretary that being unable to execute some elements of the budget is not actually cost saving. "Unable" in this case means the lack of execution of the (unspecified) elements was inadvertent as opposed to a deliberate act to eliminate them in order to save costs.

Cost saving is realised when you take deliberate action to reduce the budgeted expense on the elements that you actually execute. Such action, for example, could be negotiating lower than budgeted supply prices with your vendors/service providers, or soliciting and obtaining sponsorship for some of your planned expenses after you budgeted to foot the entire bill.

Or, in keeping with the analogy, actually arriving at the grocery and buying king fish (for $50) instead of the pink salmon (for $75). Or even better, you were able to 'sweet talk' the proprietor into giving you a $25 discount on the pink salmon, and even better than that, a good Samaritan came in and volunteered to pay for your pink salmon.

In all these scenarios you would have had your fish meal and saved a portion of or your entire $75 fish budget. However, using the secretary's definition, you would have 'saved' your $75 but you would have starved.

The format of the media conference where she made these announcements may not have allowed her to go into details, but at some point we expect the secretary to tell us exactly which were the unexecuted elements, their respective budget, and the impact of their absence on the carnival's outcome.

Would the carnival have been even more 'successful' had they come off? Would they be included in next year's budget for execution if circumstances allow? Or would they be permanently ditched seeing that the secretary believes the carnival was a resounding success in their absence?

Additionally, the Tourism Secretary and the head of the Tobago Carnival Committee keep informing us that a 'big chunk' of the budgeted sum was spent on marketing. At this level and with million-dollar budgets, officials ought not to use such vague language. Instead, good governance demands that we know at least the estimated percentage of the budget which was spent on marketing. To say 'big chunk' suggests there was no clearly defined marketing plan and budget, and the approach was to spend our money willy-nilly and tally the cost later, if at all.

I am aware that some of these officials are still inexperienced at this level, but where are the Assemb