Pittsburgh is paying to maintain a deteriorating court building — despite having no authority over the courts
For years, the city has been looking for a way to offload the property after the state stripped away the power of City Council and the mayor to appoint 17 magisterial judges and made those posts elected offices.
Since then, city leaders have argued that because they have so little to do with the operation of any municipal courts, the county — which has far greater involvement — should handle the day-to-day upkeep of the property.
Go home Douglas Adams you are drunk
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-local/2026/10/21/pittsburgh-municipal-court-allegheny-county-costs/stories/202610200044Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
4 replies
I'm not quite sure this is the right sub. While the building itself sounds like it may be in danger of collapse, it does sound like garden variety mismanagement instead of being related to the polycrisis and civilizational issues.
It's a good example of "catabolic collapse," in which rising maintenance costs in a society contribute to decline and eventual collapse.
Maybe if it was a hospital or school, but isnt this just minor consequences of an administrative shuffle?
Fair enough, this felt like a good microcosm of the absurd bureaucratic contradictions that typify "collapse of the old society". I didn't mean to share this as an indicator of some sudden severe existential collapse but rather as an indicator of what it looks like in the everyday, localized picture to experience a collapse of the old society.
You either have to believe nothing in the universe ever makes sense, or that you are living in an inherently absurd system that cannot sustain itself.