The City of New Orleans 311 OPCD Calls dataset represents every service request filed with the City of New Orleans 311 Call Center from its opening in January 2012 through the present day. In late 2018, operations transferred to the Orleans Parish Communications District (OPCD), which runs the system 24 hours a day. The dataset is published publicly on data.nola.gov under dataset ID 2jgv-pqrq and updated continuously.

This analysis was conducted as part of the NOLAServeUS platform development — a civic accountability platform for New Orleans residents. The goal: understand the existing 311 system's performance, identify patterns of service failure, establish baseline accountability metrics, and validate the need for community-verified resolution tracking.

Before drawing conclusions, it is essential to understand this dataset's quality issues. Three distinct categories were identified: clean records, logical duplicates, and corrupted date records from the 2018 system migration.

The 2018 OPCD migration corrupted date_created fields on hundreds of thousands of records, wiping all pre-2019 year data. The 2019 bucket shows 392,355 records — not actual 2019 volume, but the accumulated total of all those corrupted historical records. Clean comparable annual data begins in 2020.

Trash and recycling complaints dominate the 311 system at 46.4% of all calls — nearly half of every complaint filed since 2012. This is approximately 90 complaints every single day for 14 years straight. The city picks it up. Residents dump again. Nothing changes. No department can resolve a behavior problem — which is exactly why NOLAServeUS builds community ownership alongside complaint tracking.

Performance varies dramatically across departments. The Department of Sanitation handles nearly half of all 311 volume and resolves 98.7% of complaints. At the other extreme, the Utility Company Collective resolves fewer than 6% of complaints routed to it, and the Sewerage & Water Board leaves over a third of all water and drainage complaints unresolved.

The most alarming finding is not how many complaints go unresolved — it's how long the ones that eventually get "resolved" take to close. These are 14-year system-wide averages on clean data. They are not outliers.

Districts C and D show the highest percentage of unresolved complaints at 11.6% each. But the most revealing finding is not the overall district rate — it's the performance of specific departments within specific districts. The Sewerage & Water Board's failure rate in District E reaches 46% — nearly half of all flooding and drainage complaints in New Orleans East are never resolved.

Reliable trend analysis is only possible from 2020 onward. The clean data reveals important patterns: Trash/Recycling peaked in 2022 at 57,993 and is slowly declining. The Roads/Drainage category was quietly retired by the city after 2022. And Code Enforcement's open rate swung from 50% in 2020 to near-zero in 2021–2023 — then crashed back to 57.6% in 2024 — the clearest evidence yet that "Closed" in the 311 system means nothing without independent verification.

Based on 12+ years of 311 data, each department receives a historical baseline grade. These will appear on the NOLAServeUS homepage at launch as "Historical Performance" indicators — giving the platform immediate credibility before a single NOLAServeUS report is filed.

This analysis validates every core design decision in NOLAServeUS and provides the factual foundation for grant applications, press outreach, and community organizing. The 311 system has operated for 14 years, accepted 1,003,064 service requests, and produced these results.