(I was just looking for ski tracks among the pine trees when I came across them!)
To be fair about it, some people claim that JPL is to blaim and that NASA is more or less innocent. The claim is that a money struggle is involved, and that JPL funding is mainly if not entirely based on unmanned exploration, which would come to a sudden and drastic halt if the political class finally were to twake up to the reality that a city had been discovered on Mars while people were talking about microbes. There would never be another unmanned Mars probe; they'd all be manned.
My own view is that cities are interesting, and germs are not. I can find germs in my toilet; I don't feel any particular need to fund space explorations to look for germs. Thus, it pretty much pisses me off to keep on reading about searches for microbes while evidence of a city having been found is ignored.