Torrington, Connecticut
Where Torrington’s money comes from, what the town owes, and what it has set aside — on the state’s uniform numbers for all 169 CT towns.
Connecticut publishes the same financial indicators for every town, on the same definitions. This page uses the parts of that dataset that describe the balance sheet and the revenue side rather than the spending totals: 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. Surrounding towns — the towns sharing a land border with this one. And the town’s District Reference Group — the official 2006 CT SDE grouping of school districts with similar student demographics and similar community income and education levels, used here as a demographic peer set. Each group is summarized by its median — the middle value across the towns in the group in each year, computed from each town’s own figure rather than from group totals. For an even-sized group it is the midpoint of the two middle towns, and it is not necessarily the same town from year to year. The town is excluded from its own group medians.
Share of total revenues by source, across the years covered. “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. Each peer line is the median of the individual towns’ own shares, not the ratio of the group’s median amounts.
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 line, this town 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. Neither line on this chart is that measure: unassigned balance is narrower than unrestricted (unrestricted also counts committed and assigned amounts), and this chart’s denominator is all-funds expenditures rather than general fund alone. The guideline therefore cannot be read off either line as met or unmet, and is shown here only as a sense of scale. It is a general professional guideline in any case, not a state requirement.
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. Each peer line is the median of the individual towns’ own per-resident figures.
Principal and interest paid each year, divided by total expenditures — the share of the budget committed to past borrowing.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (annual_debt_service ÷ total_expenditures). Each peer line is the median of the individual towns’ own shares, not the ratio of the group’s median amounts.
Net pension liability plus net OPEB (retiree health) liability, per resident, in the most recent year covered, across the town and both peer groups.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators, ej6f-y2wf (net_pension_liability + net_opeb_liability, ÷ population), most recent year covered. 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.
The most recent year reported audited expenditures by function, split into salaries and wages, employee benefits, and all other costs. Function labels are the source’s own, and they cover all funds rather than the general fund alone. Where a town sends some or all grades to a regional school district, education costs may appear differently in its filing than in a town that runs its own schools.
Source: CT OPM Municipal Fiscal Indicators — Uniform Chart of Accounts, e2qt-k238 (salaries_wages, employee_benefits, other), most recent year reported, function-level subtotal rows only so nothing is double counted.
Employee benefits divided by wages plus benefits, in the most recent year reported, across the town 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, most recent year reported. 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. Because of those booking differences, small gaps between towns should not be read as meaningful. Two kinds of town are omitted rather than charted at zero: those the source does not report for that year 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.
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 |
the years OPM publishes, every CT municipality | Revenue mix, aid share, fund balance, debt, liabilities |
| Municipal Fiscal Indicators: Uniform Chart of Accounts | e2qt-k238 |
the years reported, by function and department | Wages / benefits / other split |
To pull one town by hand — paste this into a browser or a terminal, replacing TOWN NAME with the town you want. The name goes in capital letters, exactly as the state spells it (for example NEW BRITAIN), and the query returns that town’s full run of years as JSON:
https://data.ct.gov/resource/ej6f-y2wf.json?$where=town='TOWN NAME'&$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 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 trimmed JSON files this page charts. Its header documents every field and every caveat repeated above.
The files this page reads:
ucoa_indicators.json ·
ucoa_function_detail.json ·
ct_ucoa_town_indicators.json (the statewide table the peer charts read).
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.