Some say they should make it a Park-wide holiday while others say they fear the worst: that the new PFO head will do as bad a job (or worse) as Milton Struts did in his final budget.[pullquote]”I think we’ll all cycle through a range of emotions from hopeful to cynical to skeptical to disappointed and then most of us will park ourselves at thoughtful. And it is only from there that we will begin to be able to judge the value of this new budget.—UWT professor Dr. Anneliese Cissa on Budget Day 2015 [/pullquote]

Nevertheless, Valentina Abeja announced in a short statement this morning that she will present her 2016 budget at 11:00 a.m. on August 18.

According to an Animal-on-the-street poll conducted Monday by The Mammalian Daily, sixty-nine per cent of Park citizens are hopeful that the new budget will address The Park’s real needs. While ten per cent said they had grown apathetic about the budget, a full twenty-one per cent were downright negative about the chances of a budget that would strengthen The Park’s economy yet support our most vulnerable citizens.

But the poll, which was considered accurate to within two percentage points eighteen times out of twenty, likely does not reflect Park citizens’ real views, says Dr. Anneliese Cissa, head of the Livingstone School of Economics and Social Science at the University of West Terrier.

“That poll is out of date and the question needs to be revisited. The poll was taken when Animals were thinking of the budget in the abstract, when it was more of an idea than a reality,” she said in an interview on Mammalian Daily Radio early this afternoon.

According to Dr. Cissa, Park Animals have just now begun to realign their hopes and expectations with the reality of a concrete budget.

“It’s like a wish list,” she said. “You put a number of items on a wish list, but quite a few of them don’t make it onto your actual shopping list.”

Asked to venture a guess as to how a new poll would look, Dr. Cissa said she doubted whether there would be significant movement in the apathetic column.

“Perhaps a percentage point or two, I would imagine,” she said. But as for the other feelings expressed in the first poll, she had a surprising answer:

“I think some of the hopefuls will have turned unhopeful with the news [of budget day] and some of the unhopefuls will become resigned in time. So, I think within a few days, the realignment will look more like fifty-fifty than sixty-nine-twenty-one.”

And on budget day?

“I think we’ll all cycle through a range of emotions from hopeful to cynical to skeptical to disappointed and then most of us will park ourselves at thoughtful. And it is only from there that we will begin to be able to judge the value of this new budget,” she said.