CHI311 Service Requests and the Audit of "Completed"
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
Chicago put a 311 line in service in 1999 and moved the case system onto Salesforce on 18 December 2018, adding the CHI311 portal and the city's first resident-facing mobile app. Every request since is published on the city's open data portal with ward, community area, channel and both timestamps, refreshed daily. On 26 February 2026 the Office of Inspector General published the audit this kind of system usually never gets, and found the public screen misleads: a complainant sees only the deadline of the first work order — 20 days for a sewer cave-in inspection, against 110 days once the follow-on orders are counted — while the notes a crew wrote to explain what it did, or did not do, stay invisible to them. Departments frequently close duplicate reports without marking them duplicates, no definition of "completed" is published, and residents and ward staff told the auditor they experience 311 as a black hole. The wait time the site displays is calculated from the open data portal rather than the live case system, and OIG notes the portal copy is cleaned first, so it does not cover every request type.
📊 Impact
1,960,595 requests in calendar 2025, counted directly from the city's own open dataset on 7 August 2026: 1,889,546 marked Completed (96.4%), 37,323 still Open and 33,726 Canceled, with 73,036 flagged as duplicates. The phone still carries most of it — 1,034,959 calls (52.8%) against 583,303 on the web and 181,189 from the mobile app — and 60,340 requests were filed by an alderperson's office. The published file is smaller than the load the Inspector General reports, 2.2 to 2.3 million requests a year, and OIG says the portal copy is cleaned before upload and does not reflect all service request categories.
🎓 Lesson
An auditor finally asked whether a case marked closed means a problem fixed, and the answer was that trust is lost at the interface rather than in the field: the deadline shown belongs to the first work order only, the note explaining a closure is withheld from the person who filed it, and the two staff of the Service Advocacy Unit are expected to support more than 40 departments. Chicago had already conceded the other half of the problem — its own heat maps showed 311 used most in majority-white North Side neighbourhoods — so in early 2023 Streets and Sanitation stopped taking 311 requests for tree trimming and worked an 800-cell grid instead, trimming close to 124,000 trees by September 2024 against roughly 40,000 a year before. Taking a service off the complaint queue is the sharpest admission a city can make that complaint volume is not need, and some alderpeople objected, because it took away the queue-jumping their offices had been doing.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “CHI311 Service Requests and the Audit of "Completed"” — Chicago, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/chicago-311/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.