What Kansas City calls 311 about, month by month

Kansas City keeps a count of every call to 311. It is public, it is free, and it goes back to January 2017: one row a month, broken out by the line each call rang on, with how many were answered and how many callers gave up and hung up.

Most of it is what you would guess. Kansas City calls 311 about trash, and about everything else through the general line.

It also shows a count that stopped adding up. Since January 2019, calls received have not matched calls answered plus calls abandoned, and the difference is not small. Since May 2025, the water line has recorded no calls at all, while the city’s other 311 file shows its phone operators still taking water complaints every month.

The thirty-second version

• To reach 311: dial 311 inside Kansas City, Missouri, or (816) 513-1313 from anywhere. The myKCMO app and the city’s web intake take requests at any hour. Our guide to filing a 311 request has the rest.
• What people call about: in the year through April 2026, 43 percent of calls went to the general line and 30 percent to trash, recycling, and bulky pickup.
• How busy it is: about 18,000 calls a month lately, half the pace of 2017 and 2018.
• The count does not add up. Since January 2019, about one call in seven is recorded as received but neither answered nor abandoned. The file does not say what happened to them.
• The water line reads zero every month since May 2025. People did not stop calling about water.
• To see it yourself: data.kcmo.org, dataset wipe-x8yq, “311 Monthly Call Volume.”

Finding the file, in a browser

Go to data.kcmo.org and search for 311 Monthly Call Volume, or type data.kcmo.org/d/wipe-x8yq into the address bar. It needs no account.

Each row is one month. For each 311 line there are three columns: calls received, calls handled, meaning answered, and calls abandoned, meaning the caller hung up before anyone answered. The lines are the general Action Center and its overflow, solid waste, bulky items, property violation, animal control, municipal court, water, and a Spanish-language line. At the right end are three totals, an abandonment rate, and, from 2021 on, the number of call takers on staff at month’s end.

When The Stare checked on September 25, 2026, the newest row was April 2026. The city last added rows on May 4.

Two column names are misspelled in the file itself: aciton_center_received and proverty_violation_abandoned. If you query by column name, spell them the city’s way or you will get an error.

What Kansas City calls about

For the twelve months from May 2025 through April 2026, the file counts 219,101 calls. By line:

Trash dominates, and it is seasonal in a way nothing else in the file is. Solid-waste calls ran 13,568 in January 2024 and 14,523 in January 2025, against 4,311 and 7,549 in the Decembers before them. January 2026 was quieter, at 6,430. The file cannot tell you why a given January spiked. It counts calls by month and line, nothing finer.

The lines also record when a service left 311 and came back. The animal-control line reads zero from January 2021 through June 2025, then returns in July 2025, which matches the city taking animal services back from KC Pet Project in June 2025; our animal-control guide covers that handover. The municipal court line has read zero since January 2022.

Overall volume has halved. Across 2017 and 2018 the city took an average of 36,294 calls a month. In the latest twelve months it averaged 18,258. The abandonment rate fell too, from a peak of 24 percent in April 2017 to 2 or 3 percent in most recent months.

Hold on to that last number. It is where the trouble starts.

The catch, part one: the calls that were neither answered nor abandoned

A call that reaches 311 should end one of two ways: someone answers it, or the caller hangs up first. So calls received should equal calls handled plus calls abandoned. For two years, they did.

In every month from January 2017 through December 2018, handled plus abandoned came within 62 calls of received, and across all 24 months the difference totals 112: the size of rounding, a call straddling midnight at month’s end, or the odd miscount.

Then January 2019:

The gap opened that month and has never closed. It has not fallen below 1,180 in any month since. Across January 2019 through April 2026 the file records 2,310,693 calls received, 1,844,348 handled, and 133,909 abandoned, which leaves 332,436 calls, 14.4 percent, recorded as neither. That is more than twice as many as the calls marked abandoned.

No single line is to blame. In January 2019 the gap appears on every line that took calls, the general line, trash, water, animal control, court, all in the same month. That pattern points to a change in how calls were counted. Trouble in one corner of city government would not show up everywhere at once. A new phone system could do it. So could a new rule for what counts as abandoned: call centers commonly leave out callers who hang up within a few seconds, and calls that end in a recorded message, a voicemail, or a transfer to another number may not count as answered. Any of those would produce exactly this from outside.

The file cannot tell you which. Its description, in full, is “Calls received, handled and abandoned by Queue.” It has no column for voicemail, transfers, callbacks, or short hang-ups, and no note marking a change in January 2019.

This matters because of the rate the city publishes beside it. The abandonment_rate column is calls abandoned divided by calls received, and nothing more. It says 3 percent for April 2026. In the twelve months through April 2026 the file marks 5,282 calls, 2.4 percent, as abandoned, and 21,270, 9.7 percent, as neither answered nor abandoned. If some of those were callers who gave up, the real share of callers who never reached a person is higher than the published rate, and the file cannot say by how much. Nobody here is claiming those calls were dropped. The point is narrower. The city’s count cannot show they were not.

One more row to watch for. March 2019 records 7,783 calls, against 40,325 the month before and 27,519 the month after. Whatever happened that month, the row is not a full month of calls, and any average that includes it is low.

The catch, part two: the water line that went silent

Until April 2025 the water line was a steady part of 311’s load, 3,570 calls in March 2025 and 3,547 in April. From May 2025, it reads zero, and it has read zero for every one of the twelve months since.

People did not stop calling about water. The city’s other 311 file, the request log d4px-6rwg, records every service request with the way it came in. Over those same twelve months it logs 4,896 Water Service requests marked Phone Answered, between 319 and 523 a month.

The timing helps. Phone-answered water requests fell from 777 in April 2025 to 319 in May, the same month the water line went to zero. That fits water calls moving off 311 to another number, with some still reaching 311 operators or being entered into the same system by whoever answered. The request file does not record who picked up the phone, so it cannot settle that, and we won’t guess.

What it does settle is the reading a resident might take from the call file. A zero on the water line does not mean nobody called Kansas City about water. It means those calls stopped being counted there. The file does not say where they went.

This is a different finding from the request-label problems The Stare has covered in the same system. The September 10 guide to 311 and the guide to reporting illegal dumping work from the request log. This piece is about the phone count that sits beside it.

What you can do with it

To judge whether 311 is easier to reach than it was, use the file with one adjustment. Take received, subtract handled, and look at what is left as well as the abandonment column. For any month from 2019 on, that remainder is the part of the city’s count nobody has explained.

If you are calling about water, 311 still takes the request, whatever its call count says. The request file shows it happening every month.

Check us

These re-run the numbers in this piece against the city’s live files. The closed months will not change. The newest row will, once the city adds one.

# Every month's calls received, handled, and abandoned
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/wipe-x8yq.json?\$select=month_year,total_received,total_handled,total_abandoned,abandonment_rate&\$order=month_year&\$limit=500"

# The water line, month by month
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/wipe-x8yq.json?\$select=month_year,water_received,water_handled,water_abandoned&\$where=month_year%3E='2025-01-01'&\$order=month_year"

# Water requests taken by phone in the request file, by month
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/d4px-6rwg.json?\$select=date_trunc_ym(open_date_time)%20as%20month,count(1)%20as%20n&\$where=issue_type='Water%20Service'%20AND%20report_source='Phone%20Answered'%20AND%20open_date_time%3E='2025-01-01'&\$group=month&\$order=month"

Sourcing: all counts are from the City of Kansas City's open-data portal, dataset wipe-x8yq, "311 Monthly Call Volume," and dataset d4px-6rwg, "311 Call Center Reported Issues," queried by The Kansas City Stare on September 25, 2026, with each dataset's published metadata. "Neither" is calls received minus calls handled minus calls abandoned, from the file's own total columns. Shares are of total calls received from May 2025 through April 2026. The 311 phone numbers are carried from this paper's September 10, 2026 guide to filing a 311 request. No private individual, address, or request is identified in this piece. The Stare has not established what the uncounted calls were, or where water calls went after April 2025, and does not assert either.