Madison, CT — Town Finances

What you are looking at, and what it is not. The first three charts on this page come from one source: the CT Office of Policy and Management’s Municipal Fiscal Indicators, built from the audited financial statements each town files with the state and cross-walked to Connecticut’s Uniform Chart of Accounts so all 169 towns report the same line items the same way. The last two charts change measure: they come from a second state dataset covering each town’s adopted budget, introduced in its own box further down this page. That common accounting makes comparison possible, but it comes with conditions worth knowing up front:

These are audited actuals, not the adopted budget. They are what was spent at year end across all governmental funds — not the adopted general-fund budget the town approves each year.
They are gross of grant pass-throughs. Federal and state grant money the local budget never appropriates — ESSER, Title I, IDEA, food service — is counted here, so these totals are not comparable to the adopted-budget figures and are typically larger. The two answer different questions and should not be read as one series.
Coverage for these three charts. They run the fiscal years the state publishes town by town. That is the full span OPM publishes as of the pull date shown at the bottom of this page. The two adopted-budget charts below cover a different, shorter span, stated in their own box.
OPM compiled the figures itself through FY 2019; from FY 2020 forward towns self-report their own audited data. OPM discloses this change in the dataset description.

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Total expenditures

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Spending per resident

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Education share of spending

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Population

What the Town Spent, Year by Year

Audited year-end expenditures by fiscal year, in millions of dollars. Education expenditures and municipal operating expenditures are the two components of total expenditures, so the full height of each bar is that year’s total spending. Nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation.

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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (education_expenditures, operating_expenditures, total_expenditures). See the recipe at the bottom of this page.

Growth Since the First Year on Record

Each series is set to 100 in the first fiscal year shown, so the three can be compared on one scale regardless of their size in dollars. A value of 130 means that series stands 30 percent above its own starting level.

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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (total_expenditures, operating_expenditures, education_expenditures), each indexed to its own first reported year.

Spending per Resident

The same expenditures divided by the town’s population that year, split into the education and municipal shares. This adjusts for a changing number of residents but not for inflation.

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Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (education_expenditures and operating_expenditures, each ÷ population_state_dept_of_public_health).

The rest of this page changes measure: from audited actuals to the adopted budget. The three charts above are audited actuals. The two charts below come from a second CT OPM dataset — the summary financial information towns file from their adopted municipal budgets. An adopted budget is what a town appropriates in its general fund before the year begins. The audited actuals above are what was spent and received across all governmental funds after the year ends, gross of the federal and state grant money the general-fund budget never appropriates. They measure different things, so their totals differ by definition, and the difference is not overspending and not a saving.

Coverage is the span of budget years the state publishes.
It is a summary, not line items. The state collects one figure for education and one for everything else, so this dataset cannot support a department-level or object-level analysis. It shows totals and the revenue mix, and nothing below that level.
The two bases are never combined here. Where both appear on one chart they are drawn as separate bars, each labeled in the legend, and neither is added to, subtracted from, or stacked on the other.
An adopted budget is a plan, not a result. These are the amounts a town budgeted at adoption — not what it ultimately collected or spent.

Adopted Budget and Audited Actuals, Side by Side

Two different measures of the same town, drawn as separate bars and never combined. The adopted bar is total expenditures a town appropriates in its general fund for the year ahead. The audited actual bar is total expenditures across all governmental funds at year end, including federal and state grant money the general-fund budget never appropriates — which is why the audited bar is usually, though not always, the taller of the two. The audited series also ends earlier, because audits are filed after a year closes while budgets are adopted before it opens. Nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation.

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Sources (two, on different bases): adopted — CT OPM Summary Financial Information from Adopted Municipal Budgets, pcg4-s5rc (total_expenditures, by fiscal_period_of_budget, where the budget year ends June 30 of the year shown); audited — CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (total_expenditures). The two fields share a name and do not share a definition.

Where the Adopted Budget’s Revenue Was Planned to Come From

Each bar is one adopted budget year, split into the five revenue categories the state collects. Each segment is that category divided by the same year’s total adopted revenue, so every bar totals 100 percent and the years can be compared regardless of budget size. A category the source leaves blank is one the town budgeted nothing in that year, and the categories it does report still account for the full 100 percent. Use of fund balance is a town planning to draw on reserves it already holds rather than raise that amount in tax for the year, which is why it appears on the revenue side of a budget. Shares of the adopted budget only — grant money that never passes through the general fund is not counted here.

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Source: CT OPM Summary Financial Information from Adopted Municipal Budgets, pcg4-s5rc (property_tax_revenue, revenues_from_state_of_ct, revenues_from_federal, use_of_fund_balance and all_other_revenue, each ÷ total_revenue for the same budget year). Adopted budget only — a different basis from the audited actuals charted earlier on this page.

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`	All 169 CT towns, one row per town per fiscal year	Total, education and municipal operating expenditures; population
Summary Financial Information from Adopted Municipal Budgets	`pcg4-s5rc`	All 169 CT towns, one row per town per budget fiscal year, for the budget years the state publishes	Adopted total expenditures, and the adopted revenue mix

The two datasets are on different bases — audited actuals across all governmental funds in the first, the appropriated general fund in the second — and this page keeps them in separate series throughout.

To rebuild every file this page uses, run these scripts in the repository (Python 3, standard library only):

python Data/fetch_ct_ucoa.py
python Data/fetch_ct_adopted_budgets.py

Each script re-downloads its own dataset in full and writes that dataset’s raw CSV archive alongside its own _PROVENANCE.txt, recording the pull date and that dataset’s vintage, plus the trimmed JSON this page charts.

The files this page reads: the statewide table /data/ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json, the adopted-budget table /data/ct_adopted_budgets.json, plus this town’s own context file at /data/towns/<town>/ucoa_indicators.json, which names the town, its fiscal-year span, and its peer groups. 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.