How Towns Are Compared

Which towns Colchester is measured against, where each comparison group came from, what each one is good and bad at — and a rule anyone can re-run.

AUDITED FY 2013-14 → FY 2022-23
PULLED 2026-08-10

Population 15,504 CT Department of Public Health estimate carried in CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), FY 2022-23.

District Reference Group DRG D CT State Department of Education school-district grouping, last assigned in 2006.

Grand list per resident $142,320RANK 35 / 169 25% below the statewide median of $189,668 Equalized net grand list ÷ population, FY 2022-23. CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf).

Any comparison of towns is a choice, and the choice changes the answer. Compare Colchester to Greenwich and it looks frugal. Compare it to Bozrah and it looks large. Neither comparison is wrong; both are close to meaningless. This page lists every comparison group used on this site, says plainly where it came from, what it is good at, what it is bad at, and how you can check or replace it.

The site's answer to "who picked these towns?" is not "trust the author." It is: here is the group, here is its origin, here is its known weakness, and here is a rule you can run yourself that picks a group without anyone's judgment involved.

One rule governs everything below: a peer group is a tool for a specific question, not a verdict. A group that is right for comparing school spending can be wrong for comparing snow plowing. Where two defensible groups disagree, this site shows both rather than picking the one that reads better.

The four comparison groups on this site

1. DRG D — Colchester's District Reference Group

24 towns · CT State Department of Education · created 1996, last reassigned 2006 · used on the Budget Trends growth charts and the Education Comparison page

The CT State Department of Education sorted school districts into groups with similar family characteristics: family income, parents' education and occupation, family structure, poverty, home language, and enrollment. Colchester is in DRG D, along with Berlin, Bethel, Branford, Clinton, Cromwell, East Granby, East Hampton, East Lyme, Ledyard, Milford, New Milford, Newington, North Haven, Old Saybrook, Rocky Hill, Shelton, Southington, Stonington, Wallingford, Waterford, Watertown, Wethersfield, and Windsor.

Good at: education comparisons. Its inputs are the family-background variables that genuinely predict what a district costs and how students do — exactly the variables you would want held roughly constant before comparing school spending.

Bad at: anything town-side; town size. Parent education levels have nothing to do with plowing roads or staffing a police shift. DRG D also spans Milford (~50,000 residents) and Shelton (~40,000) alongside Colchester (~15,500), and per-resident municipal cost is driven hard by scale. It has also not been updated since 2006, on roughly 2000-census inputs.

2. Surrounding towns — the ones that share a border

Bozrah, East Haddam, East Hampton, Hebron, Lebanon, Marlborough, Montville, Salem · used across the site

The towns a Colchester resident actually compares themselves to: same labor market, same regional services, same weather, same road-salt contracts, often the same newspaper.

Good at: regional and labor-market context, and the comparison residents intuitively care about — what the town next door does.

Bad at: scale and school structure. The group spans towns an order of magnitude apart in size. More important, several do not run their own K-12 district: Hebron and Marlborough are in Regional District 8 (RHAM) for grades 7-12, so their reported education spending covers K-6 only and is not on the same basis as Colchester's. That caveat is carried on the Education Comparison page wherever those towns appear.

3. All 169 towns — the statewide distribution

Every CT municipality · used on Other Comparisons and in the table below

Instead of choosing peers, rank Colchester against everyone and report where it lands.

Good at: being unarguable. No selection choice is involved, so no one can claim the comparison towns were picked to flatter. It is the honest denominator when a headline number needs context.

Bad at: explaining anything. A statewide ranking mostly tells you that wealthy shoreline towns have low equalized rates and distressed cities have high ones. It answers "where does Colchester sit?" but not "is that reasonable for a town like Colchester?"

4. Rule-based peers — picked by formula, not by hand new

12 towns per set · derived from CT OPM data by Data/build_peer_sets.py · FY 2022-23 match year

Every group above was assembled by a person. This one is not. Each town's characteristics are standardized across all 169 towns, and the towns closest to Colchester in that standardized space become the peer set. Change the rule and the list changes; run it unchanged and you get the same list every time.

There are two sets, because the two questions have different drivers — using one peer group for both is the flaw this is meant to correct.

Good at: being checkable. The formula is published, so disagreement can be about the formula rather than about the author's motives. It is also current — it re-derives from the latest published data rather than from a 2006 snapshot.

Bad at: intuition and completeness. The result can include towns no Colchester resident thinks about, it has no measure of community character, and it currently lacks household income — the Census ACS API now requires a key, so the tax base per resident stands in as the wealth measure.

How the rule works

For each variable, every town's value is converted to a standard score — how many standard deviations above or below the statewide average it sits. Each town then becomes a point in that space, and the peers are the towns nearest Colchester. Two choices are worth stating openly, because they change the result:

Size and wealth variables are log-transformed first. Population, enrollment, and tax base are heavily lopsided — a handful of very large or very wealthy towns would otherwise dominate the arithmetic and flatten every real difference among mid-sized towns. On a log scale, the unit of distance becomes "twice as big," which is the comparison that makes sense for town size.
Variables are weighted equally. That is a choice, not a fact. It was not tuned to produce a particular list, and the file records the inputs so anyone can weight them differently.

Wealth is measured as equalized net grand list per resident — the town's taxable property restated to full market value, divided by population. It is both a reasonable proxy for community wealth and the quantity that actually limits what a mill rate can raise.

python Data/fetch_ct_ucoa.py && python Data/build_peer_sets.py

Inputs come from CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), fiscal year ending 2023. Output, including every town's distance so the cut at 12 can be moved or checked: ct_peer_sets.json. Full method notes in METHODOLOGY.md and data-dictionary.md.

Who the rule picks

The 12 nearest towns for each question, with how each one relates to the hand-built groups. neighbor DRG D both neither

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Where does Colchester sit among all Connecticut towns?

Where Colchester Sits Among All 169 Towns

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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), fiscal year ending 2023, all 169 towns. Higher is not better or worse — it is only higher. A high rank on reserves and a high rank on mill rate mean very different things, and this chart takes no position on either. Note the per-pupil figure here is OPM education expenditures ÷ enrollment (audited, all funds); it is not the CSDE Net Current Expenditure Per Pupil series used on the education pages, and the two are not interchangeable.

Notes

Percentile rank on each measure, FY 2022-23. 0 is the lowest town in Connecticut, 100 the highest, 50 the statewide median. No peer group is involved, so no selection choice affects these.

Where spending per resident sits on the same scale

Why some of these ranks move together

Two of these are linked by arithmetic rather than by any local decision: a town with a smaller taxable base per resident must set a higher rate to raise the same dollars. Connecticut’s Education Cost Sharing formula is also designed to direct more aid to towns with less taxable property per student, which bears on the aid-share rank.

What a percentile rank does not say

These are ranks, not judgments — whether any of them is the right level is a question the data cannot answer.

Does the answer change when the comparison group changes?

How the groups compare on the same question

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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), total_expenditures ÷ population, fiscal year ending 2023. Group medians exclude Colchester. These are audited all-funds actuals, gross of grant pass-throughs — not the adopted general-fund budget series used on the Budget Trends page.

Two things this page fixed

A label that said the wrong thing. Two scatter charts on the Budget Trends page showed a four-town set — Ellington, Tolland, Ledyard, Montville — labelled "DRG Peers." Only Ledyard is actually in Colchester's DRG D; Ellington and Tolland are DRG C and Montville is DRG F. Those four are the towns Colchester is most often measured against locally, which is a reasonable thing to chart, but it is not a District Reference Group. They are now labelled "often-compared towns." The 24-town DRG D set used on the growth charts was correct and is unchanged.

One peer set doing two jobs. Town-side spending and school spending have different drivers, and a single peer group cannot serve both. The rule-based sets are split accordingly, and where a chart on this site compares municipal operations using an education-derived grouping, that limitation is now stated rather than assumed away.

The data behind these charts

Colchester’s own series behind the charts on this page, as text. Each table names the dataset it came from and the year of every row. The peer towns and group medians the charts also plot are not repeated here; they are in the same source files, linked in the footer.

Who Colchester is compared with

Surrounding towns 8 towns

Hebron · Marlborough · Lebanon · Salem · Bozrah · East Hampton · East Haddam · Montville

The towns that share a border or an immediate labor market. Right for regional context; they are not matched on size or wealth.

District Reference Group D 23 towns

Berlin · Bethel · Branford · Clinton · Cromwell · East Granby · East Hampton · East Lyme · Ledyard · Milford · New Milford · Newington · North Haven · Old Saybrook · Rocky Hill · Shelton · Southington · Stonington · Wallingford · Waterford · Watertown · Wethersfield · Windsor

The CT State Department of Education grouping of school districts on family income, parent education, family structure and enrollment. Last assigned in 2006, and built for education questions rather than town-side spending.

Municipal peers 12 towns

Ellington · Wethersfield · Ledyard · East Hampton · Woodstock · Coventry · Plainville · Portland · Wolcott · Hebron · Montville · Somers

Town-side spending, debt, reserves, and tax comparisons. Chosen by a published formula over state data rather than by hand: the nearest towns by standardized distance on the stated variables.

School peers 12 towns

Wolcott · Plainfield · Plainville · Ledyard · Seymour · Hebron · Brooklyn · Ellington · East Hampton · Coventry · Wethersfield · Woodstock

Education spending comparisons. Chosen by a published formula over state data rather than by hand: the nearest towns by standardized distance on the stated variables.

Colchester is left out of each list above, because a town is never part of the benchmark it is measured against. Group medians elsewhere on the site exclude it the same way. Sources: surrounding towns and District Reference Group are the published groupings; the peer sets are built by a stated formula over CT OPM data (Data/build_peer_sets.py), not selected by hand.

Where Colchester sits among all 169 Connecticut towns, FY 2022-23

Where Colchester sits among all 169 Connecticut towns, FY 2022-23 for Colchester, Connecticut
Measure	Colchester	Rank, lowest to highest	Statewide median
Total expenditures per resident	$4,076	72 of 169	$4,217
Education expenditures per pupil	$22,078	73 of 169	$22,590
Equalized mill rate	19.11 mills	115 of 169	17.18 mills
Equalized net grand list per resident	$142,320	35 of 169	$189,668
Total fund balance as a share of total expenditures	18.1%	69 of 169	19.9%
Bonded long-term debt per resident	$1,265	61 of 169	$1,741
Intergovernmental revenue as a share of total revenues	30.6%	136 of 169	20.5%

A rank is a position, not a grade. Which end of the list is preferable depends on the measure and on what a reader is trying to find out. Per-pupil spending here is OPM education expenditures divided by average daily membership, which is not the state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town. Ranks computed for FY 2022-23 across all 169 towns.

Population, enrollment and tax base by fiscal year

Population, enrollment and tax base by fiscal year for Colchester, Connecticut
Fiscal year	Population	Enrollment (average daily membership)	Equalized net grand list
FY 2013-14	16,192	2,847	$1,713,186,821
FY 2014-15	16,130	2,767	$1,683,452,351
FY 2015-16	16,061	2,705	$1,686,095,860
FY 2016-17	16,029	2,624	$1,697,800,704
FY 2017-18	15,936	2,533	$1,718,352,556
FY 2018-19	15,809	2,404	$1,818,727,792
FY 2019-20	15,548	2,373	$1,829,126,260
FY 2020-21	15,501	2,212	$1,956,061,777
FY 2021-22	15,572	2,239	$2,252,056,359
FY 2022-23	15,504	2,202	$2,206,523,392

These are the size and wealth measures the peer groups described on this page are built from. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town.