Since 2009, Salem residents have filed tens of thousands of service requests — potholes, broken sidewalks, missed trash pickups, dead trees. Most get fixed. But a growing share are simply never resolved: acknowledged, then abandoned. The share of each year's requests that die this way has climbed seven years in a row and now sits at its highest level on record.
Of everything filed in 2016, about 1 in 40 requests was truly abandoned. Of everything filed in 2024 — the most recent year old enough to judge — it was 1 in 7. Aside from a single improvement in 2017, every cohort has fared worse than the one before — seven consecutive increases, and the rate has grown more than eightfold since that last good year.
Abandonment is not evenly distributed. Sidewalk repairs and traffic & parking requests are the most likely to be forgotten — nearly one in four sidewalk requests old enough to judge was simply never resolved. Streets, by contrast, is nearly clean once duplicates are excused: its apparent backlog was mostly the city marking the same pothole twice.
Duplicate tickets distort any resolution rate — so we collapsed all — of them into their canonical requests and judged each request by whether it was actually fixed. The correction cuts in the city's favor: most duplicates were left unresolved on paper even though their canonical request was completed. Citywide, honest resolution is — against a naive — — and zero closed tickets point at requests that were confirmed never fixed. We publish corrections in both directions; that is what makes §I and §II trustworthy.
The city does close requests — roughly a hundred in a typical week. The problem is the gap: in most weeks, more arrives than gets fixed, and the difference quietly compounds into backlog.
When things do get fixed, speed varies wildly by department. A dead animal is handled in days. A sidewalk repair takes a median of two and a half months — and one in ten takes over a year.
These are not statistics. Every abandoned request is a public record with a number, an address, and a date. The oldest twelve with a self-contained public trail are below — every one acknowledged by the city, then left open. You can visit each one. (Consolidated duplicates are kept in the counts but out of this table, so each entry here is verifiable in one click — notably, — abandoned requests were merged into tickets that are no longer publicly visible, their outcomes hidden from public view.)
| Age | Request | Department |
|---|