Tea For Streets
The short version
- Scale: 3.8 million residents, 502 square miles, one 311 system with 68 request types, and 1,415,288 service requests in 2024, up 5.2% in a year.
- Stakes: $286.3 million paid out in liability claims in fiscal year 2025, $44 million of it from Street Services; a $1.37 billion, 30-year sidewalk settlement; 43 Business Improvement Districts that must show owners what they got.
- Strain: pothole reports hit 6,707 in a single month this year, and only 12 of the city's 28 pothole trucks run on a given day.
- A clock: the 2026 World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the LA28 Olympics.
- Proximity: two founders who have served, live here, and file here; an LA Council District office has reviewed and validated our methodology.
- Los Angeles is our operating lab. Elsewhere, CLARK AI runs Scout Mode until residents bring it to their city.
Los Angeles is the hardest honest test
A civic assistant has one job that matters: get a resident's observation to the right desk in the right form, and hold the record of what happened next. Los Angeles makes every part of that hard, which is the point.
StreetsLA maintains 23,000 lane-miles of street and 660,000 street trees. MyLA311 is the city's system of record for resident requests, and it is busy: 1,415,288 service requests in 2024, a 5.2% increase over 2023, according to Crosstown's analysis of the city's open data. Nearly half were bulky-item pickups (about 675,000), another 22% were graffiti removal (about 317,000), and illegal dumping reports rose 19.4% to 114,268. Boyle Heights alone generated 49,574 requests.
The ground is divided. Potholes belong to StreetsLA, sidewalks to the Bureau of Engineering, graffiti to the Office of Community Beautification, dumping to LA Sanitation, and the freeway on-ramp at the end of the block to Caltrans. A "Los Angeles" address is not proof you are inside the city; 87 other cities share the county.
If a report can be routed correctly here (right city, right bureau, right type, measured, deduplicated, tracked), the same workflow is not exotic anywhere else. That was the thesis when the app first went live on January 1, 2026, and it held through the relaunch as CLARK AI in August 2026.
Los Angeles potholes, by the numbers
Potholes are where residents feel the city most directly, and the numbers are public.
- In the 2023 storm season, StreetsLA received 19,642 pothole repair requests between December 30, 2022 and April 6, 2023 and had completed about 17,459 of them by that date. Its executive director told NBC Los Angeles the normal repair response is "1 to 3 days."
- During the February to March 2024 winter storm emergency, the bureau reports it closed 8,937 pothole service requests with 13,287 individual repairs in five weeks.
- In January 2026, pothole reports hit 6,707, a 49% jump from the prior month. A StreetsLA official told Crosstown that of the city's 28 pothole trucks, only 12 run daily because of staffing shortages.
- The bigger driver is paving. Crosstown reports the city was resurfacing 700 to 850 miles a year in the late 2010s and 310 miles last year; StreetsblogLA's estimate for the current fiscal year, cited by Crosstown, is 100 to 160 miles. Fewer miles resurfaced means more potholes reported.
- The cost lands on drivers too: NBC Los Angeles reported that in 2022, more than 800 pothole damage claims were filed with the city and 182 were approved, about 22%.
Reporting is not the bottleneck in Los Angeles; the queue behind the report is. Which is exactly why we care about what happens after "submitted."
The stakes are measurable here, in public
Los Angeles publishes its own scorecard, which is rare. City Controller Kenneth Mejia reported that the city paid a record $286,345,711 in liability settlements and judgments in fiscal year 2025, against $87 million budgeted; the Controller's annual financial report attributes $44 million of that to Street Services. In March 2025, LAist reported the city expected to pay at least $320 million that year, with Public Works the second-highest department at $45 million the year before. Those payouts come from the general fund.
Sidewalks are under a court-ordered settlement, Willits v. City of Los Angeles, a 2015 ADA class action, committing $1.37 billion over 30 years. The Controller's 2021 audit counted more than 9,000 miles of sidewalk, over 53,000 sidewalk problems reported through MyLA311, more than 1,700 injury claims and 1,020 lawsuits costing over $35 million, and certificates of completed repair on fewer than 1% of the city's 640,000 sidewalk parcels.
Then the 43 Business Improvement Districts, collecting about $65 million a year in assessments. Each faces a renewal vote where owners ask what they got, and the street is where they look (What is a Business Improvement District?).
And a clock. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the LA28 Olympics put the city's public realm in front of the world on fixed dates. We make no claim about what the city will buy. We do think a city under that scrutiny should be able to prove what it knew, when, and what it fixed.
We live here, and we file the reports ourselves
Tea For Streets is a Los Angeles company. Both founders have served: I am a U.S. Air Force Reserve civil engineer and, in civilian life, a management consultant on infrastructure programs; Aaron Henehan, our CTO, is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with more than 13 years in mobile software, computer vision, and LiDAR. We built it with USC's Viterbi Startup Garage and filed the first reports ourselves, on foot, on streets we walk anyway.
That proximity is the method. Los Angeles was a self-initiated operating pilot: no contract, no RFP, no city budget, which is why the results are usable as evidence rather than vendor-reported performance. As of September 2, 2026, 83 cases had been filed into MyLA311, 93% reached active city handling, and 78% reached a city-reported terminal outcome: the city's word, not a repair we verified. An LA Council District office reviewed and validated the methodology, and a referral lane into LA Sanitation was established. Los Angeles is our operating lab; every number on this site comes from it. We are also looking at other U.S. cities of all sizes.
