How Towns Are Compared

01 Why does the comparison group change the answer?

Any comparison of towns is a choice, and the choice changes the answer. Measured against Connecticut's highest-spending municipalities, most towns' spending per resident reads as low; measured against the lowest-spending municipalities, the same figure reads as high. Neither comparison is wrong, and neither is informative on its own. This page lists every comparison group used for this town, 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 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, whose inputs are stated and whose selection of towns is arithmetic.

02 Which groups does this site compare a town against?

The four comparison groups on this site

03 How does the formula pick a peer set?

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 at the shortest straight-line (Euclidean) distance from this town. 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 data 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 the tax base per person — the quantity that constrains what a mill rate can raise. Median household income would be the more direct measure of community wealth, but the Census ACS API now requires a key this project does not hold, so the tax base per resident stands in for it.

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

Inputs come from CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators (ej6f-y2wf), the latest matched fiscal year. The output records every town's distance, so the cut can be moved or checked:

07 What has this site got wrong before, and what changed?

Two things worth stating plainly

A label has to match the group. This site got that wrong once: an earlier version described a short list of often-compared towns as a District Reference Group, when the state's own assignment placed several of them in other groups. The correction is recorded in this repository's CHANGELOG.md under 28 June 2026. The rule adopted since: every group is labeled by what it is and by who assembled it — a District Reference Group is the state's assignment, surrounding towns are the ones sharing a border, and a rule-based set is identified as this site's own construction.

One peer set cannot do two jobs. Town-side spending and school spending have different drivers, so the rule-based sets are split accordingly — one matched on the variables that drive municipal cost, one on the variables that drive school cost. Where a comparison of municipal operations has to lean on an education-derived grouping, that limitation is stated rather than assumed away.