In the first 90 days of 2024, Clevelanders lodged 327 complaints about dead animals, 420 about potholes, 827 about illegal dumping and 3,675 about trash bins. 

Those are just a few pieces of information now available at your fingertips thanks to Cleveland’s open data portal, which launched to the public on Tuesday. The goal of the portal, data.clevelandohio.gov, is to take data housed on city government computer servers and display it in the public eye. 

There are maps of crime reports, city land bank lots, Census data and parcel-by-parcel property conditions. There are spreadsheets of building permits, rental registrations and housing code violations. There is a dashboard of calls placed to the 311 complaint line – including those dimes dropped about trash and roadkill. 

More data will come in the future. The city is playing catch-up to its peers around the country in putting data of all sorts online for residents to browse. As Mayor Justin Bibb noted in a news conference Tuesday, Washington, D.C., launched its open data portal 18 years ago in 2006. 

“This is another symbol and sign of progress toward a more modern and responsive City Hall,” the mayor said, echoing his campaign promise to provide user-friendly city services. 

For Elizabeth Crowe, the director of the city’s Office of Urban Analytics and Innovation, the transparency offered by the portal will help City Hall cultivate trust with its residents. Plus, it could take some heat off of Cleveland’s public records office, which last year fielded 33,000 requests for information. 

“We are drowning in public records requests,” Crowe said. “It’s taking a substantial amount of our staff time.”

City officials didn’t have a dollar figure for the project at the ready. According to Crowe, the data portal was a “lean” operation. Staff built the website in-house, she said. 

The data portal is separate from Cleveland’s $4 million overhaul of 311, which is expected to launch later this year. Both projects are prongs of Bibb’s effort to make City Hall feel more with-the-times. 

But if the 36-year-old mayor wants Cleveland to step into the future, or at least the present, he is also looking to the past. One feature coming to the data portal will allow Clevelanders to search the records of city-owned cemeteries for relatives’ burial plots, he said.

“Right now,” Bibb said, “if you don’t know where your loved one’s plot is, the first question they ask you is, ‘Who was president when they died?’”