Reserves, Debt & Revenue
Where Chaplin’s money comes from, what the town owes, and what it has set aside — on the state’s uniform numbers for all 169 CT towns.
- AUDITED FY 2013-14 → FY 2022-23
- PULLED 2026-08-10
- Audited actuals — Audited actuals are what a town actually spent and received across all its governmental funds, as reported after the year closed. They are not the budget the town adopted.
- Peer groups — 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.
- Reserves, debt and long-term liabilities — Fund balance is what a town has not spent; bonded debt is what it has borrowed; pension and OPEB liabilities are what it has promised. The three are different kinds of obligation and do not add up.
- Medians, and why the town is left out of its own — A group is summarized by its median — the middle town, not the average. The subject town is excluded from its own group median, because a town cannot be part of the benchmark it is measured against.
- State aid — Intergovernmental revenue is money from the state and federal governments, education aid included. A town's share of it reflects state formulas as much as anything the town decides.
- Results relative to what demographics predict — A regression across all districts predicts a district's achievement index from six family-circumstance variables. The difference between what a district earned and what was predicted is its residual: a position relative to other Connecticut districts, printed with an interval, never a grade.
Full definitions, what each measure does not support, and the source behind it: How these numbers work.
- Coverage runs the years OPM publishes. That is the full span OPM publishes town by town as of the pull date. Later fiscal years have not been released.
- Where a rate is compared here, the equalized rate is used, because a posted rate steps down in a town’s revaluation year.
01 What is on this page, and on what basis?
What this page covers
Connecticut publishes the same financial indicators for every town, on the same definitions. This page uses the parts of that dataset that describe the balance sheet and the revenue side rather than the spending totals: where revenue comes from, how much the town holds in reserve, what it owes, and how its spending splits between wages, employee benefits, and everything else.
Two peer groups appear throughout. Surrounding towns — the towns sharing a land border with this one. And the town’s District Reference Group — the official 2006 CT SDE grouping of school districts with similar student demographics and similar community income and education levels, used here as a demographic peer set. Each group is summarized by its median — the middle value across the towns in the group in each year, computed from each town’s own figure rather than from group totals. For an even-sized group it is the midpoint of the two middle towns, and it is not necessarily the same town from year to year. The town is excluded from its own group medians.
02 Where does the town’s money come from?
Where the Town’s Revenue Comes From
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (property_tax_revenues, intergovernmental_revenues, total_revenues). See the recipe at the bottom of this page.
04 Which state grants make up that aid, and how much is each one?
What the State Has Appropriated for the Town, Line by Line
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Source: CT OPM, Estimates of Statutory Aid to Municipalities, sdcm-adr4 — every grant column the dataset publishes (tiered_pilot, motor_vehicle_tax, supplemental_revenue_sharing, mashantucket_pequot_mohegan, supplemental_town_aid, town_aid_road, local_capital_improvement, municipal_grants_in_aid, education_cost_sharing, adult_education, special_education_and_expansion_development, district_repair_and_improvement_project, supplemental_education_aid, district_relief_and_compensatory_use_learning_aid) and its total, packaged as /data/ct_statutory_aid.json. The first total row is added here from the lines; the second is the state’s own total, printed as the check. The state describes the earlier years as actual grant amounts and the latest as an estimate under current enacted law; none is an audited receipt on the town’s books, and estimates are revised. A different basis from the chart above, which is audited intergovernmental revenue and includes federal and other grants this dataset leaves out; the two are not compared.
05 How much does the town hold in reserve?
Fund Balance — the Town’s Reserves
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (total_fund_balance and unassigned, each ÷ total_expenditures). On the commonly cited 17% benchmark: the GFOA’s published general recommendation is that a government hold no less than two months — about 17% — of general fund operating revenues or expenditures as unrestricted fund balance. Neither line on this chart is that measure: unassigned balance is narrower than unrestricted (unrestricted also counts committed and assigned amounts), and this chart’s denominator is all-funds expenditures rather than general fund alone. The guideline therefore cannot be read off either line as met or unmet, and is shown here only as a sense of scale. It is a general professional guideline in any case, not a state requirement.
06 How much does the town owe?
Bonded Long-Term Debt per Resident
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (bonded_long_term_debt ÷ population_state_dept_of_public_health). Nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted. Each peer line is the median of the individual towns’ own per-resident figures.
07 What share of the budget goes to past borrowing?
Annual Debt Service as a Share of Spending
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (annual_debt_service ÷ total_expenditures). Each peer line is the median of the individual towns’ own shares, not the ratio of the group’s median amounts.
08 What has been promised to employees and retirees?
Pension and Retiree-Health Liabilities per Resident
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (net_pension_liability + net_opeb_liability, ÷ population), most recent year covered. Read this one carefully: these figures reflect the plans a town runs on its own books. Connecticut teachers are in the state-run Teachers’ Retirement System, whose unfunded liability sits with the state and does not appear on any town’s balance sheet, and many towns place other employees in the state MERS plan or in defined-contribution plans. A low number here means a town carries little of this obligation directly — it does not mean no obligation exists for its employees.
09 What is the money spent on?
Town Spending by Function: Wages, Benefits, Everything Else
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators — Uniform Chart of Accounts, e2qt-k238 (salaries_wages, employee_benefits, other), most recent year reported, function-level subtotal rows only so nothing is double counted.
10 How much of every pay dollar is benefits rather than pay?
Employee Benefits as a Share of Total Compensation
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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators — Uniform Chart of Accounts, e2qt-k238, “Total Expenditures” row per town, most recent year reported. Towns differ in how they book some costs — a town that pays part of its benefits out of an internal service fund or charges them to a different function can report a different split for the same underlying compensation. Because of those booking differences, small gaps between towns should not be read as meaningful. Two kinds of town are omitted rather than charted at zero: those the source does not report for that year at all, and those whose filing reports wages but no employee-benefit amount at the total level (their benefit costs appear inside another category). Charting the second group at 0% would assert they spend nothing on benefits, which the source does not support, and would pull down the group median. The omitted towns are named in the box above.
Where this data comes from, and how to get it again
Everything above is downloaded from Connecticut’s open-data portal. No account, key, or vendor software is needed — the state publishes it through a public API, and the exact files this page reads are checked into the project repository.
| Dataset | ID | Covers | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Municipal Fiscal Indicators: Individual Town Data | ej6f-y2wf |
the years OPM publishes, every CT municipality | Revenue mix, aid share, fund balance, debt, liabilities |
| Municipal Fiscal Indicators: Uniform Chart of Accounts | e2qt-k238 |
the years reported, by function and department | Wages / benefits / other split |
| Estimates of Statutory Aid to Municipalities | sdcm-adr4 |
the fiscal years OPM publishes, every grantee | Statutory aid, line by line (the one table) |
To pull one town by hand — paste this into a browser or a terminal, replacing TOWN NAME with the town you want. The name goes in capital letters, exactly as the state spells it (for example NEW BRITAIN), and the query returns that town’s full run of years as JSON:
https://data.ct.gov/resource/ej6f-y2wf.json?$where=town='TOWN NAME'&$order=fiscal_year_end
To rebuild every file this page uses, run the two scripts in the repository (Python 3, standard library only):
python Data/fetch_ct_ucoa.py python Data/fetch_ct_adopted_budgets.py
The first re-downloads both fiscal-indicator datasets in full and writes a raw CSV archive of each in Data/ct_ucoa/ alongside a _PROVENANCE.txt recording the pull date and the dataset’s own vintage, plus the trimmed JSON files this page charts. The second pulls the statutory-aid file, checks every grantee’s lines against the state’s own total before writing anything, and records the result in the file’s metadata. Each script’s header documents every field and every caveat repeated above.
The files this page reads:
ucoa_indicators.json ·
ucoa_function_detail.json ·
ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json (the statewide table the peer charts read) ·
ct_statutory_aid.json (the statutory-aid table).
Each carries a metadata block with the source URL, the pull date, the dataset’s last-updated date, and the definition of every field. Method notes live in METHODOLOGY.md and data-dictionary.md in the repository.
The data behind these charts
Chaplin’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.
Reserves and debt by fiscal year
| Fiscal year | Total fund balance | Unassigned fund balance | Bonded long-term debt | Annual debt service |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2013-14 | $1,083,985 | $973,130 | $141,213 | $27,790 |
| FY 2014-15 | $1,060,961 | $655,996 | $120,682 | $27,790 |
| FY 2015-16 | $918,440 | $797,377 | $98,775 | $43,749 |
| FY 2016-17 | $976,389 | $927,892 | $75,800 | $29,545 |
| FY 2017-18 | $1,770,866 | $1,341,289 | $51,705 | $35,019 |
| FY 2018-19 | $1,392,632 | $1,300,983 | $0 | $61,966 |
| FY 2019-20 | $2,179,180 | $1,396,181 | $0 | $9,007 |
| FY 2020-21 | $2,388,523 | $1,989,050 | $0 | $9,369 |
| FY 2021-22 | $2,216,063 | $1,487,368 | $0 | $13,741 |
| FY 2022-23 | $1,904,738 | $1,431,609 | $74,886 | $0 |
Unassigned fund balance is the part of reserves not already committed to a purpose. It is a subset of total fund balance, not an addition to it. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town.
Revenue sources by fiscal year
| Fiscal year | Property tax revenues | Intergovernmental revenues | Total revenues |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2013-14 | $5,228,720 | $2,725,419 | $7,990,607 |
| FY 2014-15 | $5,337,826 | $2,854,128 | $8,333,534 |
| FY 2015-16 | $5,599,463 | $2,704,394 | $8,407,336 |
| FY 2016-17 | $5,702,017 | $2,938,522 | $8,716,903 |
| FY 2017-18 | $6,672,820 | $2,659,059 | $9,425,283 |
| FY 2018-19 | $6,240,451 | $2,999,720 | $9,378,170 |
| FY 2019-20 | $7,159,087 | $2,744,917 | $10,021,628 |
| FY 2020-21 | $7,075,340 | $3,123,212 | $10,477,411 |
| FY 2021-22 | $6,888,478 | $2,401,433 | $9,459,511 |
| FY 2022-23 | $7,271,403 | $3,422,360 | $10,869,049 |
Intergovernmental revenue is money from the state and federal governments, education aid included. Property tax and intergovernmental revenue do not sum to total revenues; fees, permits and other local sources make up the rest. Source: CT OPM, Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf) - audited actuals as filed by each town.
Where Chaplin sits among all 169 Connecticut towns, FY 2022-23
| Measure | Chaplin | Rank, lowest to highest | Statewide median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total expenditures per resident | $4,832 | 129 of 169 | $4,217 |
| Net current expenditures per pupil (school year 2024-25) | $29,547 | 151 of 169 | $23,247 |
| Equalized mill rate | 18.91 mills | 112 of 169 | 17.18 mills |
| Equalized net grand list per resident | $178,613 | 67 of 169 | $189,668 |
| Total fund balance as a share of total expenditures | 18.3% | 72 of 169 | 19.9% |
| Bonded long-term debt per resident | $35 | 4 of 169 | $1,741 |
| Intergovernmental revenue as a share of total revenues | 31.5% | 139 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 is the state Department of Education's Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil for the school year in its label, every town read in that same year; a town whose regional district runs every grade carries the district's figure, so the member towns of one district tie. 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. Per-pupil spending: CT State Department of Education, Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil (via ct_ncep_towns.json).