How to report illegal dumping in Kansas City

Someone left a couch, six tires and a mattress on your curb. Kansas City has a number for that, and most of the time it works.

Dial 311, or (816) 513-1313, or open the myKCMO app. A request about dumping on the street goes to a city unit whose work group is called, plainly, NHS Illegal Dumping. In most months, half of those requests are closed within two weeks.

For about seven months, they were not. Requests filed from July 2025 through January 2026 carry the longest waits in the file, and most of them were closed out in a single day. What the city’s record cannot tell you, for any of them, is when the trash actually left.

The thirty-second version

• To report it: dial 311 inside Kansas City, Missouri, or (816) 513-1313. The city’s 311 page gives the call center’s hours as Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. The myKCMO app on iOS and Android and the city’s web intake take reports at any hour.
• Where it goes: dumping on a street, curb or sidewalk goes to NHS Illegal Dumping, in Neighborhoods and Housing Services. Every such request since October 2024 went there.
• How long it takes: in most months, a median of two weeks or less to close.
• Keep the work order number. It is the only way to find your request again without wading through the traps below.
• To look it up: data.kcmo.org, dataset d4px-6rwg, search box, type your street name and the word dumping. Leave off “Ave” and “St”.
• Do not search “right of way.” You will get dead animals and mowing.
• “Resolved” is a date on a record. For requests filed in the second half of 2025, it does not tell you when a truck came.

Filing it

There is one door and three ways through it. Call 311 from a Kansas City, Missouri line, or (816) 513-1313 from anywhere; use the myKCMO app; or use the city’s web intake. All three produce the same kind of record in the same system.

Residents and city workers file these in almost equal numbers. Of the 23,812 right-of-way dumping requests in the file since February 2021, 12,219 were filed by the public and 11,593 by city staff, which means a crew or an inspector who spots a pile logs it the same way you would.

Describe where it is, not just what it is. The request is sorted by where the trash sits: the street and curb, the alley, a construction-debris dump, a landlord’s move-out pile. Each is its own category and can go to a different crew. If you have a photo, attach it, and write down the time.

When the system hands you a work order number, keep it.

Looking it up afterwards, in a browser

Go to data.kcmo.org and open dataset d4px-6rwg, “311 Call Center Reported Issues”. It is free and needs no account.

Use the search box at the top of the dataset page, and type your street name plus the word dumping. For Prospect Avenue, that is:

prospect dumping

On September 25, 2026 that returned 806 requests, 762 of them illegal-dumping reports; the rest were trash complaints filed under Parks or the Land Bank, which is usually what you want anyway. The search box ignores capital letters, and it treats dumped and dumping as the same word.

Typing Prospect Ave dumping returned 770, 36 fewer, because not every address in the file carries its suffix. So leave off “Ave”, “St” and “Blvd”. Do not search for the category’s name, either, for the reason below.

The catch, part one: the same complaint, spelled three ways

The request most people file, dumping on the street or the curb, has been stored under three different labels:

Dumping in the Right-of-Way    12,926 requests   Feb 2021 – Jan 2025
Dumping in a Right-of-Way       9,965 requests   May 2021 – Jun 2026
Dumping in a Right of Way         921 requests   May 29, 2026 – now

The first two ran side by side for almost four years. The third, with the hyphens gone, started on May 29, 2026. Together they are 23,812 requests as of September 25, 2026.

The portal’s column filter lets you pick a value from a list. Pick today’s label and you see 921 of the 23,812, about 4 percent. That filter is also exact about capitals: the same label typed in lower case returns zero, with no warning that you have typed it wrong.

The obvious fix makes it worse. Search the whole dataset for the phrase, and the box finds it everywhere:

The extra tens of thousands are dead animals “on or within the right of way”, mowing “on the right of way”, permits to plant or remove a tree “in city right-of-way”, and hazardous waste. A hyphen halves the answer. Neither number is the one you wanted. Street name plus dumping is the search that works.

This is not the first time this paper has found a 311 label written more than one way. The September 10 guide to filing a 311 request found the city’s largest category split in two; the September 19 street-light guide found a pipe where a comma belonged. The defect has not been fixed; it has gained a third spelling.

The catch, part two: the months the clock broke

Take every right-of-way dumping request the city marked resolved, group them by the month they were opened, and take the median of days_to_close, the city’s own figure for how long each took. For most of the file it looks like a service that works:

Every month from January through June 2025 came in at 14 days or less. Then, starting with requests opened in July, the median jumps to eight months, and falls one month at a time, the shape of requests that were all closed on or around one date.

They were. On March 27, 2026, the city marked 1,391 right-of-way dumping requests resolved in a single day, every one of them assigned to NHS Illegal Dumping, and 899 of them opened between July and December 2025. It was the busiest closing day of the year across the entire 311 system, with 2,023 closures of every kind. For scale, those 1,391 are about four in ten of the 3,415 right-of-way dumping requests that carry a 2026 close date.

What that day means is the part the file does not say, and the city has a reasonable answer on the record. In June 2025, city officials told KCTV5 that crews had “started referring cases to the Solid Waste Division for cleanup.” If the pickup was logged as separate work, the original request could have sat open for months after the trash was gone, then been swept closed when someone reconciled the queue. Nothing in the public file distinguishes that from a pile left standing. The file never records a pickup date. It records a close date.

For the reader, that is the practical point. For a request filed in the second half of 2025, “resolved” tells you when the city closed the record, not when a truck came. If you filed one then, the record will not tell you what happened. If you file one now, the recent months look like the old ones again: a median of two to twelve days since February 2026.

The catch, part three: the table the city made for the story

One month before that stretch began, the city told KCTV5 that illegal dumping was improving. The report, on June 18, 2025, gave the city’s figures as a 300 percent increase in prosecutions, a 30 percent improvement in response times, and about 3,500 cases resolved since a tougher dumping ordinance passed in 2024.

The numbers behind that are still on the city’s open-data portal, in a two-row table, vq2p-ztbx, titled “Comparative for Illegal Dumping Story.” Its description in full reads: “Only for internal use to create story visuals.” The city created it in July 2025, and anyone can open it.

Prosecutions went from 14 to 56, which is the 300 percent. The response-time figure is smaller than reported: 28.21 days to 22.09 is 21.7 percent faster, not 30. The table does not say when “since May 1, 2024” ends, so it cannot be checked month for month.

The city measured its improvement with days_to_close, the same field that, for the requests filed over the next seven months, records the slowest closes in the file.

Check us

These re-run the counts in this piece against the city’s live file. The totals will be larger by the time you read this; the closed months and March 27 will not.

# The three spellings, with the dates each was used
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json?\$select=issue_sub_type,count(*),min(open_date_time),max(open_date_time)&\$where=issue_sub_type%20in('Dumping%20in%20the%20Right-of-Way','Dumping%20in%20a%20Right-of-Way','Dumping%20in%20a%20Right%20of%20Way')&\$group=issue_sub_type"

# How many were closed on March 27, 2026, and by which unit
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json?\$select=department_work_group,count(*)&\$where=issue_sub_type%20in('Dumping%20in%20the%20Right-of-Way','Dumping%20in%20a%20Right-of-Way','Dumping%20in%20a%20Right%20of%20Way')%20AND%20resolved_date='2026-03-27'&\$group=department_work_group"

# What the search box returns for "Right of Way"
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json?\$select=count(*)&\$q=Right%20of%20Way"

# The city's own comparison table, and its description
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/vq2p-ztbx.json"
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/vq2p-ztbx.json"

Sourcing: all counts are from the City of Kansas City's open-data portal, dataset d4px-6rwg, "311 Call Center Reported Issues," and dataset vq2p-ztbx, "Comparative for Illegal Dumping Story," queried by The Kansas City Stare on September 25, 2026, with each dataset's published metadata. Medians are of the city's days_to_close field on requests marked resolved, grouped by the month each was opened. The city's June 2025 figures and the referral to the Solid Waste Division are as reported by KCTV5 on June 18, 2025. The 311 phone number, the call center's stated hours and the myKCMO routes are carried from this paper's September 10, 2026 guide to filing a 311 request; kcmo.gov refuses automated requests, including its illegal-dumping page, and did so again this week. No private individual, address or request is identified in this piece. The Stare has not established why the requests described here closed when they did, and does not assert a cause.