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). ~155k 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 (~97k, balance still owing) / Paid (~51k) / 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
• Dates - violation date, due date, last paid date
• Place - block / lot, neighborhood, police district, council district

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold

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

Example inputs

One citation by number

{"citationNumber": "58073123", "maxResults": 5}

Open balances of $500 or more - status=open means the balance is still owing.

{"status": "open", "minBalance": 500, "maxResults": 25}

Citations on one street - address is a substring match on the violation location.

{"address": "Reisterstown", "maxResults": 25}

Citations by status - aggregate=true returns one summary row per group with a count.

{"aggregate": true, "groupBy": "status"}

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.

Example output

One citation - citationNumber=58073123 returns the citation:

{
 "platform": "md-ecb-citations",
 "source": "baltimore-ecb",
 "groupKey": "",
 "groupCount": "",
 "groupBy": "",
 "citationNumber": "58073123",
 "status": "Open",
 "lienCode": "L",
 "description": "UNREGISTERED OR INOPERABLE VEHICLE",
 "violationLocation": "2827 WINCHESTER ST",
 "violationDate": "2026-09-08",
 "dueDate": "2026-10-11",
 "hearingDate": "",
 "hearingStatus": "",
 "fineAmount": "50",
 "balance": "50",
 "totalPaid": "0",
 "totalAbated": "0",
 "totalVoided": "0",
 "lastPaidDate": "",
 "lastPaidAmount": "0",
 "neighborhood": "Winchester",
 "policeDistrict": "Southwestern",
 "councilDistrict": "9",
 "block": "2388",
 "lot": "034M"
}

aggregate=true, groupBy=status - citations by status:

Open      ~97k
Paid      ~51k
Voided   ~4.4k
Abated   ~1.9k

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