Park Finance Officer Milton Struts looked confident yesterday as he addressed members of the Park’s media community.

After releasing the PFO’s expense projections for 2015, otherwise known as The Park Budget, Struts boasted that this was the best budget his office had configured in more than a decade.

“It’s slim, trim, and to the point,” he said before taking questions from members of the media who had seen the budget on Tuesday but had been told to keep details about it under wraps.

Some of the financial reporters present seemed cynical about the figures while others were downright hostile to the “new formula.”

Yuri Sturgeon of The Kaluga Register was the first to question the 45% figure for “resident requirements.”

“How can you put everything that Park citizens require into one basket? Surely something will be left out, either by design or mistake,” he pressed.

While Struts tried to reassure him, The Salamander Evening Post’s Camlin “Cayuga” Newt broke in with criticism of the decision to lump both arts and sports events together with “Special Events.”

“You’re not fooling anybody with that figure,” he said. “Any way you look at it, we’ve lost 2% of the budget. We just don’t know where, exactly.”

The lack of transparency in the budget drew the ire of even seasoned political analysts such as Ronald Grouse. Speaking on a special edition of Yannis Tavros’s Toro Talk Radio show yesterday, The Avian Messenger’s chief political analyst called the budget “the most disorderly, disorganized, and potentially dysfunctional budget” he had ever seen.

“There is almost nothing there,” he said. “There are almost no specifics. If you add up the Miscellaneous category with Residents’ Requirements, you’ve allocated more than half the budget to … what? We may never know.”

Meanwhile, advocates for better growing conditions in The Park seemed pleased by aspects of the budget.

In a joint statement released this morning, the Weather Makers, Producers and Sellers Alliance of The Park (WMPSAP) and the Society of Concerned Park Cultivators, Planters, Growers, and Farmers (SCPCPGF) praised the doubling of funds for the purchase of weather.

“It’s taken a long time for us to get our message across, but we believe we’ve finally been heard,” the statement said.

Human giving the boot to the food requirements of Park Animals

An investigation has concluded that Human Direct Investment (HDI) in The Park is responsible for some of the food shortages that Animals have experienced over the past year.

The investigation, which was conducted over a twelve-month period by The Park Police Force’s Undercover Operations Unit (UOU) revealed that, in January of 2011, the sitting Archons, in conjunction with the Park Finance Officers, agreed to “rent” out portions of The Park’s farmland to Humans for their personal use. The agreement explicitly allowed for use of the land for the purpose of growing food for the exclusive consumption of Humans.

“There was no stipulation as to sharing the harvest or any discussion, as far as we know, of their [the Humans’] reinvestment in The Park,” said UOU head B.N.L.Valerian Beetle at a news conference held this afternoon.

“This was a bad deal, all around,” said A.P. Civet, President of The Park’s Society of Concerned Park Cultivators, Planters, Growers, and Farmers (SCPCPGF) in an interview on Mammalian Daily Radio following the news conference.

“These so-called allotment gardens were given over for cash only, without any thought to the consequences,” she said.

It is because of those almost certain consequences that Park Animals find themselves in a state of fear this Summer, as they look at the likelihood of a truncated harvest and face the possibility of not being able to feed themselves from Park lands alone.

“Importing food is something we try to avoid at all costs…and primarily because of the cost of doing so. But, with our growing population and with the Archons not looking out for Animal welfare, it’s almost a certainty that we will have to do just that this year,” Civet said.

See also: Food production scandal rocks Park

Others in The Park, even more critical of the agreement, have turned their anger toward the Park Finance Office.

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” said A.J. Babirusa, president of the newly-formed activist group, Take Back The Park (TBTP). “You can’t eat money. They should know that,” he said.

Babirusa’s group has launched a lawsuit against the PFO, accusing it of illegally selling the rights to farmland without the consent of Park citizens.

“Archons come and go,” Babirusa said. “But the PFO should know better. They’re in charge of our welfare…or so we thought,” he said.