Trash, Parking and Dead Animals: Here's What Boston Called 311 About This Month, and the Parks Department's Overdue Problem
14,037 requests in 30 days. Litter topped the list, and almost half of the Parks Department's cases are marked past due.
What's got Boston heated? Trash, mostly. From Sept. 19 through Oct. 18, 2026, people opened 14,037 requests with Boston 311. The number one topic was litter and debris with 1,907. Then illegal parking (878), needle pickup (815), missed trash pickup (769) and dead animals (745).
Trash runs all through the list. On top of missed pickups, there were 725 complaints about trash put out too early, 657 about improper trash storage, 605 about illegal dumping and 434 about overflowing barrels. Add those up with litter and missed pickups and it's 5,097 trash-related requests, more than a third of everything.
Here's the one that sticks out. Parks and Recreation got 1,611 cases in that window, and 734 of them are marked overdue. That's about 46%, the worst share of any department with more than 500 cases. A lot of that is tree work: pruning requests alone had 173 overdue out of 281.
Compare that to Animal Care and Control, 87 overdue out of 625, and Boston 311's own team, 18 out of 484.
How we reported this
Boston Uncut queried the City of Boston's 311 Service Requests (new system) dataset for requests opened Sept. 19 through Oct. 18, 2026 (UTC), grouping by case topic and assigned department and counting the on_time field. The trash total adds the litter, missed pickup, early trash, improper storage, illegal dumping and overflowing trash topics.
