Baltimore City Environmental-Code Violations (ECB)

The city's environmental-code enforcement ledger - every citation the Baltimore Environmental Control Board has issued against a property, in one queryable dataset. Property-level code-enforcement diligence: the violation history of one address, an open-balance sweep, or a district-wide view.

Data

Baltimore City, Maryland open data (public Environmental Control Board register). ~150,800 citations spanning two decades, actively updated (violations through September 2026).

Each record carries:

• Citation number - the citation's stable key
• Violation location - the property address cited (fully populated)
• Description - the violation (nuisance / trash / abatement / tobacco and more, e.g. "FAILURE TO REMOVE OR ABATE ALL NUISANCES")
• Status - normalized to Open (~95k, balance still owing) / Paid (~49k) / Abated (~1.9k) / Voided (~4.4k)
• Fine amount, balance - what was assessed and what is still owed
• Resolution buckets - total paid / abated / voided by resolution
• Lien code - whether the citation carries a lien (L on ~125k)
• Hearing - hearing date / status / request-received date
• Dates - violation date, due date, last paid date
• Place - block / lot, neighborhood, police district, council district

Low cost

From $0.0003 per record.

The source publishes this as a wide flat table where status is a padded single character and dates come back as raw millisecond timestamps - fine for the city's own map, painful if you want to actually cut it by place, status or money. We made the ledger directly queryable: citationNumber / address / status / minBalance-maxBalance / policeDistrict / neighborhood / violation-date windows all filter before a record returns, status reads as plain Open / Paid / Abated / Voided, and groupBy (counts by status / district / neighborhood / lien code) comes back as clean server counts. You query a violation ledger that behaves like a database; the cleanup stays on our side.

Every record is one flat JSON object - no PDFs, no portal pagination.

Use cases

• Property violation history - every citation against an address, with status, fines and balance
• Open-balance sweeps - properties with outstanding code-enforcement balances above a threshold
• Code-enforcement analysis - aggregate citations by district, neighborhood or lien status to see enforcement patterns

Inputs

Field	What it does
citationNumber	exact citation lookup
address	violation-address substring
status	open / Paid / Abated / Voided
minBalance / maxBalance	outstanding-balance range
policeDistrict / neighborhood / blockLot	find by place
violatedFrom / violatedTo	violation-date window
aggregate + groupBy	counts by status / district / neighborhood / council district / lien

Output fields

citationNumber / status / lienCode / description / violationLocation / violationDate / dueDate / hearingDate / hearingStatus / fineAmount / balance / totalPaid / totalAbated / totalVoided / lastPaidDate / lastPaidAmount / neighborhood / policeDistrict / councilDistrict / block / lot.

Honesty note: this ledger names properties (addresses), not individuals. The source's police-district column carries a few misspellings (e.g. "Notheastern") that are passed through as published. The register is served from the city's hosted ArcGIS Online org - always verify a live run's row content, since that org has at times served stale copies to cloud IPs.

Source: Baltimore City open data (Environmental Control Board citations, public records).