Spending vs. Peers

What you are looking at, and what it is not. Every chart on this page comes from one source: the CT Office of Policy and Management’s Municipal Fiscal Indicators, built from the audited financial statements each municipality files with the state and cross-walked to Connecticut’s Uniform Chart of Accounts so that every town reports the same line items the same way. That is what makes a town-to-town comparison possible. It also comes with conditions worth knowing before you read a single chart:

• These are audited actuals across all governmental funds — not adopted budgets. They record what was actually spent, including grant money (federal and state education grants, food service and the like) that a town’s own budget never appropriates. Totals here are not comparable to the adopted general-fund budget the town approves each year, and are typically larger. The two answer different questions and should not be read as one series.
• Coverage. This page covers every fiscal year the state publishes town by town; the exact span appears here once the data loads.
• Two peer groups appear throughout. The surrounding towns are the municipalities sharing a land border with this town, taken from the town’s own configuration file. The District Reference Group (DRG) is the group of Connecticut school districts the state has judged to serve similar student and community populations. Each group is summarized by its median. The median is the middle value of the group in each year: line the towns up from lowest to highest and take the one in the middle, or, where the group has an even number of towns, the midpoint of the two middle towns. It is less sensitive to one unusual town than an average would be, and it is not necessarily the same town from one year to the next. The subject town is excluded from its own group medians.
• The District Reference Groups were last assigned in 2006. They reflect district demographics as they stood then. A town whose population, income or enrollment has shifted since may fit its group less well today than it did when the groups were drawn.
• Responsibility for the underlying figures changed partway through the period covered: the state compiled the earlier years itself, and in the later years municipalities self-report their own audited data.