Colchester, CT — How Towns Are Compared

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 Colchester Sits Among All 169 Towns

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.

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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.

How the groups compare on the same question

Total expenditures per resident, FY 2022-23. The same Colchester figure against four different reference points — the reason this page exists.

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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.