You can weep about my tone all you want, but I don't see you addressing substance even for a moment.

For the record - seeing you lambaste residents of The Run for daring to care about their community, and then trading in silly childish whining about my condescension...is uniquely goofy.

If someone actually condescends in their tone to you, you'll have earned it many times over.

>somebody in hazlewood died because an ambulance couldn’t get through the unplowed streets.

I was in the City County Building that day. Ravenstahl was heavily affected by that and he had a meeting with Public Safety officials in which he was losing it - loudly screaming. It's not fair or accurate to say that this wasn't on Luke's radar. You don't have to tell me or anyone else who worked for the city at that time about it.

I spent about a month's work of work focused specifically on Snowmageddon. I can tell you more about how it affected the city organization than you probably want to hear.

That much snow would have paralyzed the city no matter who the mayor was. Yes, Luke was in Seven Springs, but that's irrelevant. Snow removal operations are/were the specific task of a specific manager in DPW. And guess what - that manager during snowmageddon was the same manager tasked with the same responsibility until he retired during the Peduto admin.

Any changes that took place after snowmageddon started taking place immediately in 2010. They weren't appreciably improved under Peduto. The snow tracker was NOTHING except a costly CYA move that did absolutely nothing to improve snow response times or efficiency.

I have a few things I credit Peduto for...but he also earned my disrespect. He worked hard at it and he finally broke me.

I am going to politely tell you that Googling up a few stories in 2023 isn't an adequate replacement for knowing what you're talking about.

Imagine the mess that Ben Carson created at HUD during his brief tenure.

You've got it backwards. No one in The Run objects to necessary storm infrastructure improvements. They object to them being paired with a silly, inadequate, poorly planned and extremely unpopular autonomous project.

>Now that the project is canceled, the activists have moved on to other nonprofit bashing efforts while the run is still in the same shit condition and always will be because saline street should be a stream instead of a street

just...wow...

I wish you a good day, and lotsa luck.

>It didn’t seem to me like they made any compelling arguments about how the MOC would negatively affect them besides spend the money on bailing out their basements instead.

I'm not touching this mess, other than to say that you've done an awful job understanding their concerns. I'm certainly happy to note that your conception of the concerns wasn't relevant in how that whole thing went down.

Here's the problem. At that point, Bill Peduto was a City Councilman. He came at the CIS department not from a position of authority - in fact he did his best NOT to work with the administration chain of command. A "favor" to Bill - and him berating our Director - was outside of our workflow.

To emphasize - a "favor" to Bill Peduto involving a department and a team of employees that don't report to him isn't a valid workflow. We ALSO had important projects that our actual bosses tasked us with.

A software project done as a "favor" - that's typical of Peduto's leadership shortcomings. He was lucky that our Director even gave him the time of day, but he did...and that sort of thing didn't go over well in his chain of command.

I wonder how far "favor" software projects flung over by councilpeople got when Bill became mayor. Probably not far. Sadly, his leadership shortcomings only became more pronounced.

If Priya had paying customers that got back-burnered for this "favor"...yeesh, what a debacle. What an operational miasma. Those customers must have wondered what they were paying for. Maybe after paying the company, they also needed to ask Peduto for a favor, eh?

Silly nonsense.

...you're kinda thin-skinned, aren't you? Not difficult to see why you'd have some trouble guiding a software project to completion.

>I also think the outrage against that project was simple NIMBYs and opportunistic activists riding on the hate toward Upmc

Dude, they were residents of the Run...people who lived there. You're eager to call other people "condescending", but wow, dismissing their concerns in this way is just insulting and thick-headed.

Thanks for the evaluation, I'll file it away...and I'll keep my evaluation of you to myself. But I'm not seeing any substantive responses to the points I've made...telling...

>I don’t think CMU deserves the bad reputation some people have about them.

My point is that this "reputation" gets thrown around when someone wants to lend power to their amateurish software projects, and in many cases, that works for them. Without question, CMU has some of the best people in the world doing things...and they have others. Nothing monolithic - either good or bad - should be assumed when the CMU letters get tossed in, but that mistake is often made. I hope you understand that point better.

OK, thanks for correcting on Priya. However, I don't say that a prof in CS necessarily knows a thing about application development just because they hold a CS credential, and in this case, that really proved out. You're saying that she didn't do well managing the project because it was difficult and "not worth the trouble"...boy, I don't think that's a shining endorsement, and I think it's an admission of why the thing failed, really.

My characterization of a student with an access DB in his dorm room - truthfully, literally - was how Priya described your side of things when things didn't move along as they should have. So, thanks for correcting, but...

I think you probably had some difficulty working through networking and firewall stuff. I can back you up there - the city at the time was embarrassingly deficient in Network Admins, but...I'm not even sure why they had the role they did in the plan. There was no reason for user-submitted data to even enter the city firewall, I remember making that point. At very least, on your side you could have stood up a prototype that proved out your concept and feature development. Getting hung up on networking...not something that should have happened.

Maybe you know better now - building software can be difficult, and when you face issues, you have to take ownership, stay focused, keep pressing and finding creative solutions. What you can't do is just recede, talk crap about your own team behind their backs, shift blame to others. But, maybe not...

Wow, ok. I have to say, the software stack you introduced left a lot to be desired. The team you briefly interacted with at the city definitely wanted to work with you and did so when given that opportunity. But the person on your side who need to manage the project just didn't do anything except shift blame around - blaming you a good portion of the time, you should know.

Yes, there are a fair amount of obstacles for things like networking and firewalls when it comes to working with the city, but even setting those things aside, you guys had considerable difficulty fixing your bugs or collecting feature requests or just with implementation in general. Blaming that on the city is goofy. You guys weren't the right team to be doing that project, which is why it sunk.

As for me "not liking" Peduto because he was progressive and spoke about fixing problems and reform...also silly. I liked him for exactly those reasons, and I supported these ideas until it was clear that he really had no ability to take any of it past talk. I only "disliked" him when he started handing out blame and making excuses and retreating from the stuff he said he'd work on. I worked for 7 years trying to "push the city to change its outdated ways", I didn't just yap about it.

A little more about iBurgh - in this city, to get some tech idea off the ground, all you have to do is find some way to get the letters CMU into the mix, and people are ready to get out of your way reverently. That's a big problem...and no one was a bigger purveyor of this approach than Bill Peduto. In that case, the company "developing" it was a person who had some non-tech affiliation with CMU (a friend/acquaintance of Bill's) and a student who was trying to run an access database on a PC he had literally in his dorm room.

That's not how you build good software, even in the context of how city people want to "pull levers" to do it. Silly...and it's a shame these things are remembered (or Google search-curated) somehow by you and others as successes.

LOL! This discussion isn't a personal attack. Just trying to help you understand a bit more.

I worked on both iBurgh and Snow Tracker implementation while in city employ.

iBurgh was a mess - a disaster that Peduto brought to us and demanded we implement. The developers of the app were friends of his. The app wasn't anywhere close to being production ready...and it ultimately was abandoned because the developer just couldn't or wouldn't fix the many issues. Afterwards Peduto blamed the failure on Luke Ravenstahl - which was comical and entirely false.

The Snow Tracker was/is a disaster also. Really, a book should be written to describe that whole fiasco. Among the highlights - corrupt procurement, opacity of DPW, failure of leadership to understand or provide requirements, CYA nonsense, and on and on.

iBurgh happened while he was a councilman. He had no tech role. He did throw a bunch of fits as the project kinda bombed. His main interest was that we beat Boston to the punch in announcing it, he didn't give a rip about whether it worked or what he was demanding in terms of department time/resources to deal with it.

Snow Tracker started the minute he became mayor - fueled by his fear that a snow storm would generate criticism of him, and he should know about that - he usually led the charge against the prior admin when snowflakes fell. He knew exactly how unfair or how difficult that would be to deal with, because he himself had lobbed unfair/difficult criticism over the years. The Snow Tracker was literally all he wanted to talk about in the first few weeks of his administration, and that took a toll on getting a good start with so many other things. He was petulant, childish, difficult. And...the thing still is a mess.

Oh, cool, a Google Search dump. Does any of that help you add substance to:

>Peduto was a city council member for 12 years. He was hands on in the technology departments at the city and worked on updating systems.

So you're referencing a puff piece from 2016 as an example of something Peduto did while he was a Councilman? Maybe not...but I wonder if any of the folks in this thread who have interacted with the inspection and permitting process might have a different take on what has been achieved there?

Like it or not, PGH had positive national press prior to Peduto's administration. Even while Ravenstahl's stature crumpled, the good press kept on going. I think it's fair to point out that this press cycle isn't tied directly to individual mayors in reality. Ravenstahl didn't come in and turn PGH around by himself, nor did Peduto...but both made contributions in that regard.

>He was hands on in the technology departments at the city and worked on updating systems.

Um - I worked in that department at the time, I know pretty well what he did and didn't do. I don't think "hands-on" is an accurate description. Among the things he did was express that tech wasn't his forte. What systems are you claiming that he updated? I'll be interested to hear about these.

>Gainey spent some time in random jobs at the city level

Gainey was Ravenstahl's Economic Development Manager.

>Ravenstahl was a joke.

We could have a discussion on Ravenstahl's merits and demerits, there were many of each. I'd like for that discussion to be informed, though...so I'll hold off on that for now.

...it doesn't work that way. For one, Zoning Administrators should and do have a fair amount of autonomy/distance from the Administration. Also - mayors have come into office with all sorts of promises about changing zoning law and reforming the process. What exactly have any of them achieved? Namely, what did Peduto achieve, after promising all sorts of stuff? At the end of the day, it was all about "tweet at Dan Gilman if you need something"...a Kushner-esque process that was similarly ineffective

Um...

• all city mayors are criticized constantly
• Peduto didn't have any particular inside knowledge of the city or of City processes...no more or less than Gainey or Ravenstahl. He retweeted knowledgeable planners and urbanists, but he did so without absorbing much of the content in relation to governing PGH.
• Developers complained bitterly about Peduto, just like all other mayors.
• What levers could/did Peduto pull? Just curious if there are any examples.

the objective for this media org is to get hits and sell ads based on those numbers. Whether we like it or not, there are no other considerations or standards on the table.

Editors...wait, what? The Market fixes all, right?

https://www.wesa.fm/podcast/land-power

^ highly recommended

But...nary a word about "affordability covenants", which I think it's important to understand when you're talking about affordable housing.

WatkinsGlennDanzig is a next-level user handle