Recently, a friend who lives in Stafford asked me a couple of budget-related questions. I figured if she’s asking those questions, you might be, too. So, here are the answers.
Where does our mill rate fall compared to other surrounding towns and comparative populations?
To begin answering this question, I dug up our District Reference Group (DRG) information. This is the group of towns that our schools are compared to based on their socioeconomic status. So, it seemed like an obvious comparison point.
Many of these towns are considerably smaller than Stafford. For instance, Sterling, which has the lowest rate in the DRG, has fewer than 4,000 people. Griswold, East Windsor, and Plymouth, on the other hand, have population sizes roughly the same as Stafford’s. With the exception of Griswold, the mill rates for each of those towns are within a few points of each other. Below are all the towns in that DRG and their mill rates.
Canterbury - 23.0
East Windsor - 34.28
Enfield - 30.56
Griswold - 25.07
Montville - 27.77
North Canaan - 25.5
Plainville - 31.42
Plymouth - 37.0
Seymour - 35.98
Sprague - 28.5
Stafford - 36.76
Sterling - 22.22
Thompson - 26.0
Voluntown - 27.77
Windsor Locks - 33.6
Wolcott - 31.87
Here’s a look at the mill rates of our surrounding towns from lowest to highest:
Somers - 28.31
Union - 28.35
Enfield - 30.56
Willington - 32.16
Vernon - 33.39
Ellington - 34.30
Stafford - 36.76
Tolland - 37.33
It’s worth having a brief discussion about what mill rates are: A mill is equal to $1.00 of tax for each $1,000 of assessment. So, a town where home values are higher may have a lower mill rate than a town with lower property values, even though the individual homeowners may end up paying roughly the same dollar amounts in both towns. According to Zillow, the typical home value in Griswold is $302,866. In Stafford, it is $287,188. While these are not the numbers that the assessors use, you can begin to see why Griswold might have a lower mill rate than a comparably sized town like Stafford. Similarly, a town with more taxable property (whether it's commercial or private) may have a lower overall mill rate, though, as we recently revealed, that's not always the case.
How does state money fit into the road paving budget?
We covered this in more detail in this article, but here’s the quick answer:
State funding – Stafford typically gets somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000 in town aid from the State, and that money buys salt for the winter, gravel for dirt roads, and if anything is left over, it goes toward paving. Leftover funds are allocated to repave New City Road this summer.
Grants – The town has received $33 million in grants since 2018. However, most run-of-the-mill paving projects don’t qualify for grants. In many cases, a road has to qualify as a collector road or higher to be considered. For example, Furnace Road is considered a collector road and consequently was eligible for grants and is being fixed without any local funds. However, most of the collector roads in town are state roads and, therefore, not under the purview of the town. Grants also usually require that that town has down the design work so that they are “shovel ready,” and historically, the town has missed out on grant opportunities because it did not have the money to do the initial design work. The ARPA committee recently approved funds to help with that.