Public Works/311

What “adopted”, “proposed”, and “actual” mean

Proposed = the spending plan the Mayor submits to the City Council. Adopted = the appropriation the City Council approves when it passes the budget — an authorization to spend, set before the fiscal year begins, not a record of what was spent. Actual = spending as reported after the fact in audited financial statements (ACFRs). Oakland budgets in two-year cycles; fiscal years here are labeled by their end year (FY2022–23 → 2023). Amounts are department totals across all funds unless noted.

Coverage gap in the 311 dataset

February 2023 carries 1,921 requests across 8 of its 28 days; no request in the dataset is dated in March 2023. April 2023 carries 15,689 requests across 14 of its 30 days, of which 11,763 are dated to the single day of April 18, 2023.

2023 records 103,318 requests against 89,281 in 2022 and 112,450 in 2024. Within 2023, the three affected months carry 17,610 requests, where the year's other 9 months average 9,523 a month; three months at that rate would be 28,569, 10,959 more than the dataset holds — about 1.2 months of requests, counting the requests dated to the catch-up day.

Documented context, from this site's corpus: Resolution 89643 C.M.S. records a local emergency “Proclaimed By The City Administrator On February 14, 2023, And Ratified By The City Council On February 16, 2023” in response to a ransomware attack on city systems, and states that “as a cautionary measure, ITD took certain non-emergency systems offline while they worked to secure and restore services safely, which may have resulted in delays in City services”. The accompanying report, dated March 16, 2023, states that “ITD is still working to restore systems impacted by the ransomware attack” (report, resolution). The dataset itself carries no field marking a request as re-dated or backfilled, so the shapes above and this outage are stated separately: the documents establish that city systems were offline over these dates, not that any particular request was re-dated.

Consequences for the figures on this page: the affected year's request counts — citywide, by queue and by council district — are short by the amount above and are not comparable to the years beside them. The median days-to-close figures for the affected year are affected too: that measure is the difference between a request's recorded open date and its close date, so a request recorded later than it was filed reads as closing faster than it did.

How the 311 queue system works

Every 311 service request carries a service-queue code (the dataset's REQCATEGORY field) naming the work queue it was routed to. Queues map to the crews or units that handle the work — most belong to Public Works, others to Transportation, Parks, Fire, or Police. The charts and tables on this page count requests by that code.

Definitions below are derived from the dataset itself — the request descriptions filed under each code — plus the code's published label. Where no official expansion of a code was located, that is stated rather than guessed.

• Illegal dumping — Dumped debris, appliances, mattresses and green waste.
• Other — Catch-all queue: code-enforcement referrals, miscellaneous and app/web requests with no dedicated queue.
• Abandoned vehicles — Abandoned-vehicle reports. Queue added in 2018; from September 2022 it carries the abandoned-vehicle reports previously filed under POLICE (see the re-routed queues below).
• Building maintenance — City-building upkeep: structural, electrical, plumbing, custodial, keys and locks.
• Police — Requests routed to the Police Department. Queue added in 2018; every request filed under it is an abandoned-vehicle report, and from September 2022 those reports are filed under ABANDONED AUTO instead (see the re-routed queues below). It is not a count of police-related requests in general.
• Streets & sidewalks (STREETSW) — Label as published; no official expansion located. Requests filed under it are predominantly potholes, street-surface deterioration and curb & gutter repair.
• Graffiti — Graffiti on public and private property.
• Parking — Parking-enforcement requests.
• Electrical — Street-light, traffic-signal and pedestrian-signal outages and damage.
• Trees — Street-tree pruning, downed trees and limbs, tree permits.
• Recycling — Recycling, trash and compost collection issues: missed pickups, abandoned containers, billing.
• Traffic — Traffic-sign and pavement-striping maintenance, including graffiti on signs.
• Parks — Park litter, landscape maintenance, irrigation, mowing.
• Homeless encampment management (HOMELESS EMT) — Homeless-encampment reports. Queue added in 2018.
• Traffic engineering — Traffic-safety and traffic-signal change requests.
• Meter repair — Parking-meter maintenance.
• Drainage — Storm-drain clogs and damaged or missing inlet grates.
• Sewers — Sanitary-sewer blockages, odors, missing manhole covers.
• Keep Oakland Clean & Beautiful (KOCB) — The Public Works cleanup program: street cleaning and street litter containers.
• Right-of-way inspectors (ROW INSPECTORS) — Inspections of utility infrastructure and of construction obstructing the right of way.
• Homeless encampment cleaning (HE CLEAN) — Encampment-cleanup requests. Appears from 2014.
• Right-of-way streets & sidewalks (ROW STREETSW) — Sidewalk damage and curb-ramp inspections.
• Fire — Requests routed to the Fire Department: hazardous materials and fire-hazard vegetation.
• Cut & clean — Weed abatement in the public right of way.
• Environmental enforcement (ENVIRON ENF) — Illegal-dumping reports flagged for enforcement. Queue added in 2020.
• Right of way (ROW; retired) — Right-of-way inspections, 2013–2018. It ran alongside the separate ROW INSPECTORS and ROW STREETSW queues and was retired in 2018 — a retired category, not a rename.
• Sideshows — Sideshow-prevention requests. Queue added in 2022.
• Watershed — Creek and storm-drain illicit discharge and creek vegetation management.
• Cityworks configuration (CW DIT GIS) — Internal staff tickets configuring the Cityworks work-order system, not resident service requests. Label as published; no official expansion located.
• Facilities — Near-empty queue; label as published, no official definition located.
• Survey — Near-empty queue; label as published, no official definition located.
• Lab — Near-empty queue; label as published, no official definition located.
• Vegetation control (VEGCONTR) — Near-empty queue; label as published, no official expansion located.

The queue set has changed over the years. Queues added since the series began in 2013: HE CLEAN (2014), ABANDONED AUTO, POLICE and HOMELESS EMT (2018), ENVIRON ENF (2020), SIDESHOWS (2022). Retired: ROW (last used 2018).

Queues whose work moved to another queue

Two pairs of queues in this list are not independent categories: the same requests were re-routed from an old queue code to a new one, so one series falls away as the other fills up. Both were checked in the source file by grouping rows on queue code, request description and month.

Police → Abandoned vehicles. Police runs 11,750–22,772 requests a year across 2019–2022; Abandoned vehicles runs 6,227 in 2022 and peaks at 25,545 in 2024. Police has no value for 2023. From 2024 on it carries a residue of 6–16 requests a year. Every request filed under POLICE is an abandoned-vehicle report (99.7% carry the description “Parking - Abandoned Vehicle”), as are the requests that fill ABANDONED AUTO. In the source file the handover is dated: POLICE's last ordinary month is August 2022 (1,640 requests), it falls to 319 in September 2022, and ABANDONED AUTO rises from 24 requests in August 2022 to 1,431 in September 2022. The source file contains no POLICE rows dated 2023 at all, which is why that year has no value rather than a zero. The two series are complements — the same work under a new queue code — so neither can be read on its own as a change in how much of that work was requested.

Homeless encampment cleaning (HE CLEAN) → Homeless encampment management (HOMELESS EMT). Homeless encampment cleaning (HE CLEAN) runs 2,974–3,013 requests a year across 2019–2021; Homeless encampment management (HOMELESS EMT) runs 12 in 2021 and peaks at 7,149 in 2025. From 2022 on it carries a residue of 10–587 requests a year. Both queues carry the same request descriptions (“Homeless Encampment”, “Homeless Encampment - Living in Vehicle”); the handover runs through 2022. The two series are complements — the same work under a new queue code — so neither can be read on its own as a change in how much of that work was requested.