Charts that are interesting context but don't directly inform the Colchester budget story.
Why these charts live here: Statewide CT rankings (like every-town mill rate) are tempting to look at, but they aren't apples-to-apples for Colchester. CT towns vary enormously by income, density, urban/rural character, and service mix — Greenwich, Hartford, and Salisbury are not comparable to Colchester in any meaningful way, and pooling all 169 into a single ranking mostly tells you that wealthy shoreline / Litchfield towns have low equalized rates and distressed cities have high ones. For most policy questions about Colchester, the DRG peer set (Ellington, Tolland, Ledyard, Montville) and the neighbor / regional set (Bozrah, East Haddam, East Hampton, Hebron, Lebanon, Marlborough, Salem) are the more useful comparisons — they hold population, income, and community character roughly constant, so any remaining differences are more likely to reflect actual policy choices rather than the structural differences between, say, a hedge-fund town and a former mill town. The chart below is here for completeness; it's not the chart to drive conclusions from.
Where does Colchester’s equalized rate sit among all 169 towns?
Equalized Mill Rate — All 169 CT Towns Ranked
19.11 mills equalized places Colchester 115th of 169 towns, counting up from the lowest rate.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), equalized_mill_rate and mill_rate_real_estate_personal fields for fiscal year ending 2023, pulled 2026-05-24 from data.ct.gov. Groton (City) is excluded — it is a sub-municipality within Groton and does not have an equalized rate reported. Reval factor in tooltip = equalized ÷ nominal; values near 0.55 indicate a stale (pre-reval) grand list, values near 0.70+ indicate a recently revalued grand list. See glossary entry "Effective rate / equalized mill rate" for methodology.