How to file a 311 request in Kansas City (and find out what happened to it)

There is a pothole on your street, or a pile of somebody’s couch on the corner, or a streetlight that has been out since spring. Kansas City has a number for that, and the number works. What is harder is the second half: finding out whether anything actually happened.

The good news is that the city publishes all of it. Every 311 request since 2021 sits in a free database that needs no account, no fee, and no records request: 825,829 of them as of September 8, 2026. You can read your own request in it. You can read your whole block’s.

The catch is that the file has a few traps in it, and two of them will hand you a confidently wrong answer. Here is how to file, how to look it up, and how to read it without fooling yourself.

The thirty-second version

To file: dial 311 inside Kansas City, Missouri, or (816) 513-1313. The city’s own 311 page gives the call center’s hours as Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. The myKCMO app on iOS and Android files the same request at any hour, as does the city’s web intake. All of these routes land in the same system and produce the same kind of record.

To check it: go to data.kcmo.org, dataset d4px-6rwg, “311 Call Center Reported Issues.” Search on your request number, which the file calls reported_issue.

Do not filter by status, and do not trust the days_to_close column at face value. Both are explained below.

What the routes actually are, by volume

These are the city’s own counts of how the 825,829 requests arrived, captured September 10, 2026.

Those are the city’s own labels, reproduced rather than translated: the file does not define WEB RAI or CMS RAI anywhere in its published metadata, and The Stare is not going to guess for it. Six rows carry no route at all.

The phone is still how most of Kansas City talks to Kansas City. Nearly half of everything in the file came in that way, and another 3,127 requests came from voicemail, which means somebody called and nobody picked up.

One number in that table is worth sitting with before you file anything. Sort the file by who opened the request rather than how, and 439,259 requests were opened by city staff against 386,570 by the public. The majority of Kansas City’s 311 traffic is the city reporting things to itself. That is not a scandal, since an inspector who spots an illegal dump while driving to another call is doing the job, but it does change what the number means. When you file a 311 request you are joining a queue that is mostly municipal.

The two groups also do not move at the same speed. Among requests that actually reached a resolution date, the ones opened by the public took 39.1 days on average and the ones opened by city staff took 27.9. Resist the obvious reading of that. The two groups are not filing the same mix of work (a staff-opened request is often a specific, already-scoped job entered by the person who will supervise it, while a public-opened request may need triage before anyone knows what it is), and this file carries nothing that would let anyone control for that. It is a difference worth knowing and not, on this evidence, a difference in how seriously the city takes you.

Trap one: the city writes “done” four different ways

This is the one that will get you.

The current_status column has twelve distinct values, and four of them mean finished:

The portal’s filters are exact-match. A resident who opens the dataset, clicks the status filter, and picks Resolved (the capitalized one, which is what a filter list sorted alphabetically tends to surface first) is looking at 58,756 finished requests and cannot see the other 692,801. That is 7.9 percent of the answer, presented as the whole of it.

The obvious explanation would be a migration: an old spelling, a new spelling, a cutover date. That is not what the data shows. Both resolved and Resolved carry requests into September 2026. They have run side by side for years. assigned and Assigned do the same, as do received and Received.

The Stare has not established why, and there is a plainly innocent possibility: more than one upstream system writes into this file, and they do not agree on capitalization. What matters for a reader is only this: search on your request number, never on the status.

Trap two: days_to_close is filled in for requests that never closed

The file has a column called days_to_close. It is populated on 825,813 of 825,829 rows, which looks like an unusually complete dataset and is not.

46,572 of those rows have no resolution date at all. They include 14,986 requests still marked received, 5,592 still marked new, 1,835 assigned, and 21,904 canceled. On those rows the number is not how long the city took to finish the job. It is how long the request has been sitting, and it runs as high as 1,940 days, five years and four months.

The consequence is arithmetic:

• Average days_to_close across the whole file: 47.8 days
• Average across only the 779,257 requests that carry an actual resolution date: 33.1 days

The first number is 44 percent higher than the second, and it is the one you get by doing the obvious thing. Neither number is the city’s published service target; both are what its own file says. If you compute a closure time from this dataset, filter to rows where resolved_date is not null, and say that you did.

While you are in there: 22,655 requests are still open — status new, received, assigned, or active. The oldest was opened at 8:36 in the morning on March 4, 2021, the day the current system went live. It has been open for the entire life of the system that holds it.

Trap three: the biggest category in the file is written two ways

Ask the portal what Kansas City calls 311 about most and it will tell you Property Violations, with 110,371 requests. That is wrong, and the city’s own data proves it.

There are 64 distinct issue types in the file. Exactly one is written two different ways, and it is the largest:

The second spelling is the first one with the slashes replaced by spaces. Both send the work to the same place: PW Solid Waste takes 90,948 of the first and 55,081 of the second. They were also both in active use for three years and ten months, from November 2021 to August 2025, so this is not a rename with a clean cutover — for most of the system’s life, the same complaint was being filed under two labels at once.

Add them together and trash is 146,054 requests, which makes it the largest category in Kansas City’s 311 file by a margin of nearly 36,000 over Property Violations. The city’s most-common-issue ranking is wrong on its own portal unless you know to sum the two.

Again, the innocent reading is available and probably right: a category label got edited, and the old one kept working. The Stare is not asserting otherwise. But anyone who has ever quoted a 311 top-issues figure for Kansas City — a council office, a reporter, a neighborhood association — has a better than even chance of having quoted the wrong number one.

The honest limit: 41 percent of requests have no work order

This is the part the dataset says about itself, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

From the city’s own description of the file:

“Detailed work order data and resolution of requests may not be found in this system as this represents 311 requests only; for more information see those specific departments.”

Measured: 339,582 of the 825,829 requests, or 41.1 percent, carry no work order number.

So when a request goes to resolved, what has been established is that the 311 system considers the intake finished. Whether a crew came, what they did, and whether it held is generally in a departmental system — Public Works, Solid Waste, Water Services, Neighborhoods — that this file does not mirror. 311 tracks the asking. It does not consistently track the doing. That is the honest answer to why a request can read “resolved” while the couch is still on the corner, and it is a design fact, not an accusation.

If you need the doing, the work order number is the handle, and you have a 59 percent chance of having one.

Check us

Everything above came from unauthenticated requests to the city’s own endpoint. Any reader with a terminal can re-run them. Here is the trash-label finding in one line:

# The five most common 311 complaint types
curl -s -G 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$query=SELECT issue_type, count(*) AS n GROUP BY issue_type ORDER BY n DESC LIMIT 5"

Here is the difference between the naive closure time and the honest one:

# The naive closure time against the honest one
curl -s -G 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$query=SELECT avg(days_to_close) AS naive"
curl -s -G 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$query=SELECT avg(days_to_close) AS honest WHERE resolved_date IS NOT NULL"

The Stare keeps a script that re-derives every number in this story against the live endpoint and fails loudly if one has moved. It ran clean on September 10, 2026.

Two things this file will not tell you

Anything before March 2021. The current dataset begins with the myKCMO system that replaced PeopleSoft CRM. Requests from 2007 to March 2021 live in a separate file, 7at3-sxhp, with a different structure. The two do not join, so a trend line crossing March 2021 is hand-assembled and ought to say so. Curiously, the current file also holds 70 requests opened before the March 4, 2021 launch the city describes, the earliest on February 18.

Whether your particular thing got fixed. See above. For that, get the work order number if there is one, then ask the department that owns it.

Sourcing: all figures are from the City of Kansas City's open-data portal, dataset d4px-6rwg, "311 Call Center Reported Issues," queried by The Kansas City Stare on September 10, 2026, together with the city's own published description and column metadata for that dataset. The full capture, the queries that produced every number, and a script that re-derives them are archived at editorial/_sources/311-lookup-2026-09/. The phone number and the myKCMO app routes are as published by Kansas City Parks and Recreation, a city department, captured the same day; kcmo.gov itself refuses automated requests, so the call center's stated hours are quoted from the city's 311 page as it was reported in search results and could not be independently archived by this paper. No private individual, address, or request is identified in this piece. Where this story reports an inconsistency in the city's data, it reports it as a measured fact and does not assert a cause; The Stare has not established one.