Welcome to the Burgh! Despite our problems, it can be a wonderful place to live! Hope you enjoy it here.

Our local government is just like any large government body in that the overwhelming majority of government workers are not elected but instead appointed or hired. So nothing wrong with that inherently. The issue comes up when the staff are allowed to basically set their own agenda and priorities, taking actions that may not be to the letter of the law. Unfortunately, many of these people don’t care (they may think they now better, or sometimes it just make their lives easier so they don’t care). Additionally there isn’t really any recourse that you have other than to sue. But the staff very often has no legal risk. You sue the city and not them personally. So if they do something that is against the law and they do it knowingly, they typically have no real risk personally. In other words, there is no downside for them.

For the aggrieved parties, you have to take the risk of fighting city hall. That includes time and money. Your opponent is a juggernaut with a monopoly on tax collection, so getting them to back down is pretty hard. It’s not like a private business. In many cases, it ends up better to take your lumps and salvage what you can when dealing with the city. A bitter pill to swallow.

Pittsburgh isn’t the only city with this problem. It’s more the rule than the exception in most places to greater or lesser degrees.

Pittsburgh basically has a political monoculture. This is a big problem here as it means most of the population is disenfranchised and receives no representation in matters of the government. Voting almost doesn’t matter unless you are very progressive and then your choice is between a couple of different progressive voices. I’m not saying progressives are good or bad here. I’m just saying that when you have basically one thought group making policy unopposed, you end up with a lot of chronic overstepping or convenient oversights.

I want to caveat this whole post though. While there are some people in local government that are problems, there are many hard working people trying to do the right thing too. So please don’t take this as an indictment of all local govt staff. You have to meet people where they are and see them for who they are. Anything less than that isn’t right.