Where the money comes from, what the town owes, and what it has set aside — on the state's uniform numbers for all 169 CT towns.
The Budget Trends page already uses this dataset to compare Colchester’s spending growth with its peers. This page covers the parts of the same state dataset the site had not used: 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, matching the rest of the site: surrounding towns (the eight towns bordering Colchester) and DRG D (the official 2006 CT SDE District Reference Group Colchester belongs to). Each group is summarized by its median, and Colchester is excluded from its own group medians.
Share of total revenues by source, FY 2013-14 through FY 2022-23. “Other local” is total revenues minus property taxes and intergovernmental aid — permits, fees, charges for service, investment earnings.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (property_tax_revenues, intergovernmental_revenues, total_revenues). See the recipe at the bottom of this page.
Intergovernmental revenues divided by total revenues. A higher share means more of the town’s income comes from outside the property tax; a lower share means more is raised locally.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (intergovernmental_revenues ÷ total_revenues). Aid includes education grants (ECS and others) that pass through the town’s books.
Reserves as a share of total expenditures, on two measures. Total fund balance (solid lines) counts restricted, committed, assigned, and unassigned amounts together, and is the measure available for every town. Unassigned (dotted rust line, Colchester only) counts just the portion carrying no designation. The two answer different questions and land in different places, so both are shown.
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. That is a narrower measure than total fund balance and a narrower denominator than all-funds expenditures, so it lines up with the dotted unassigned line rather than the solid total line. It is a general professional guideline, not a state requirement and not a target Colchester has adopted.
Outstanding bonded debt divided by population. Debt rises when a town borrows for a capital project and falls as principal is repaid, so the line is expected to step up and then decline.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (bonded_long_term_debt ÷ population_state_dept_of_public_health). Nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted.
Principal and interest paid each year, divided by total expenditures — the share of the budget already committed to past borrowing before any current-year choice is made.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (annual_debt_service ÷ total_expenditures).
Net pension liability plus net OPEB (retiree health) liability, per resident, FY 2022-23, across Colchester and both peer groups.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (net_pension_liability + net_opeb_liability, ÷ population), fiscal year ending 2023. 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.
FY 2022-23 audited expenditures by function, split into salaries and wages, employee benefits, and all other costs. Education is the Board of Education’s total across all funds, which is larger than the BOE’s adopted general-fund appropriation.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators — Uniform Chart of Accounts, e2qt-k238 (salaries_wages, employee_benefits, other), fiscal year ending 2023, function-level subtotal rows only so nothing is double counted.
Employee benefits divided by wages plus benefits, FY 2022-23, across Colchester and both peer groups. This is the share of every compensation dollar that goes to health insurance, pensions, and other benefits rather than to pay.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators — Uniform Chart of Accounts, e2qt-k238, “Total Expenditures” row per town, fiscal year ending 2023. 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. Treat differences of a point or two as noise. Two kinds of town are omitted rather than charted at zero: those the source does not report for FY 2022-23 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. See also the Insurance and Health Insurance Fund pages.
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 |
FY 2013-14 – FY 2022-23, 170 entities | Revenue mix, aid share, fund balance, debt, liabilities |
| Municipal Fiscal Indicators: Uniform Chart of Accounts | e2qt-k238 |
FY 2019-20 – FY 2022-23, by function and department | Wages / benefits / other split |
To pull one town by hand — this returns Colchester’s ten years as JSON in a browser or terminal:
https://data.ct.gov/resource/ej6f-y2wf.json?$where=town='COLCHESTER'&$order=fiscal_year_end
To rebuild every file this page uses, run the script in the repository (Python 3, standard library only):
python Data/fetch_ct_ucoa.py
That script re-downloads both datasets in full and writes four files: a raw CSV archive of each dataset in Data/ct_ucoa/ alongside a _PROVENANCE.txt recording the pull date and the dataset’s own vintage, plus the two trimmed JSON files this page charts. Its header documents every field and every caveat repeated above.
The files this page reads:
ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json ·
ct_ucoa_function_detail.json.
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.