Cash crunch continues at MoBay Marine Park
THE Montego Bay Marine Park is likely to cut its already meagre staff, as its financial problems worsen.
The Montego Bay Marine Park Trust, which manages the facility, has been in desperate financial straits since April 1999, when the Natural Resources Conservation Authority withdrew its annual $2.5 million subvention.
With the loss of those funds, the park was forced to let go five of its 11 employees. And last year, the Park lost another $5 million in funding usually supplied annually by the National Park Trust Fund. According to managing director Jill Williams, further staff cuts may be done.
“We are cruising along on an empty tank of gas from the remains of the last fund-raiser and we are desperately scrambling and trying to get some secure funding in place,” she said.
Williams added that over the past year, the Trust had managed to sustain operations only because they had scaled down operations.
She maintained that from all indications, the only immediate contribution to their $10 million budget is the promised $125,000 from the Beach Control Authority.
“We have no income, we are spending our savings at the moment and obviously that’s not going to be sustainable,” she said. “So, cash flow predictions have us out of funds pretty soon if we don’t cut back some more and find some new funds pretty quickly.”
And while the managing director said the Trust would not give up and would pull out all the stops to secure funding and sustain its operations, she called on the government to play its part in maintaining the island’s entire park system.
“Government should make some sort of a commitment. Even if it doesn’t give us the money, they should at least put something in place where we can charge (an admission fee),” she said. “The fundamental flaw with the whole system is that none of us have any source of steady income. So we have to keep on doing project proposals, fund-raisers, and looking around for cash to keep on going. Because we don’t have a system in place where we get a part of the (country’s) budget or user fees or something that we could count on as an income.”
