Austin's Charette charade

Change Austin on Austin's voter input on budget:

"Meanwhile, the rest of us peons in Austin are related to like well… peons, being asked questions like, ‘Would you prefer to cut libraries or charging people to get in to the Trail of Lights’! "

Oh, and the news we hear is that Austin is going to do both.

The short story on the City of Austin’s 2009-2010 Budget is this: the budget items selected for public scrutiny were limited to items m, n, o, and z. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the alphabet soup covering the full width and breadth of the budget were off limits.

Is this process a charette or a charade? Maybe it is both!