Thursday: It's Called Follow-Through

Pittsburgh's acting building inspection chief submitted his letter of resignation Wednesday, about a year after his predecessor was fired in a staff shake-up. (Trib, Jeremy Boren)

This seems to be a troubled position.

Cipriani recently has overseen a building code enforcement crackdown on negligent landlords, particularly in Oakland where derelict student housing has created dangerous living conditions for the neighborhood's many college students.

On Sept. 17, Cipriani accompanied Ravenstahl and other city officials in a "code walk" through Bloomfield.

One of Bill Peduto's cronies complained to us some time ago that the press is never going to follow up on the results of Ravenstahl's spate of neighborhood crackdown tours -- each one meriting its own front-page articles with the giant color photographs of the mayor pointing and walking with rolled up sleeves and tough talk and Diana Nelson Jones treatments and things of this nature.

Maybe this will spark some follow-up. Like we indicated, there may be pressures impacting the work of the Bureau of Building Inspection -- though this may be yet another generic manifestation of things bouncing around and getting lost in the shuffle.

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The City Paper takes a dim view of the newly announced Pittsburgh Contracting Best Practices Commission, likening it to one of those blue-ribbon do-nothing Presidential commissions, and adding that it seems like a stall tactic. (LINK)

414 Grant Street take an even dimmer view. (LINK)

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat goes dim but funny. (LINK)

Progress Pittsburgh: Dim but short and to the point. (LINK)

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Tom Barnes or maybe Timothy McNulty go all-out trying to get us jazzed up about state politics (of all bizarre topics) at Early Returns.

Why? Because state revenues aren't rolling in the way state legislators and Gov. Ed Rendell had hoped back in July, when they adopted the 2008-09 state budget. According to a hot-off-the-press report by the state Revenue Department, and reported on in today's Post-Gazette by the ever-alert Tracie Mauriello, state revenues are down for the third straight month in this fiscal year.

Okay, interest piqued. When some of the colorful characters in Harrisburg start going at it like the cast of Telemundo, please let us know.