Most communities win, some lose in magazine's ranking of Connecticut towns

We know we shouldn’t care, but it’s impossible not to. Connecticut magazine has come out with its bi-annnual list of top towns in the state and town leaders and real estate sellers are checking the numbers to see how the six Northwest Corner towns fared.

Pretty well, for the most part.

Sharon was even honored with a photo on the opening page of the story, showing a trio of boys skateboarding by the United Methodist church on the north end of the Green.

Falls Village First Selectman Patricia Mechare proudly noted that her town and the town of Kent are in the top 10 for towns with a population of 3,500 or less (Falls Village has 1,081 residents; Kent has 2,858).

Mechare made the observation at the March meeting of the Northwest Connecticut Council of Governments, which is attended by first selectmen from nine Litchfield County towns.

"You didn’t mention that Sharon is number four on the list," pointed out Malcolm Brown, the first selectman of Sharon (population 2,968).

Salisbury rates high, but not on this particular list. It earned a number five ranking among towns with a population of 3,500 to 6,500 (Salisbury has 3,977 residents).

North Canaan (population 3,429) didn’t fare particularly well in this year’s listing; it is ranked 20 out of 27.

Cornwall (population 1,539) had a somewhat higher rank, at number 13, but was still lower than the selectmen seemed to think it should be (for more, see story page A6). The selectmen theorized that it is the town’s crime statistics that drag the town downward.

"Cornwall always comes out badly because there are so many thefts at Mohawk," commented Dan McGuinness, executive director of the Council of Governments. He was referring to the annual number of snowboards and skis that get nicked at the Cornwall ski hill.

Cornwall First Selectman Gordon Ridgway, who walked into the meeting just as the discussion of his town’s rank was ending, observed with a manly (tongue-in-cheek) snarl that in his town "only the tough survive."

Connecticut magazine has been producing its survey every two years since 1993. Staffers at the magazine, including editor Charles Monagan, compile data on categories including population, crime, median house costs, average income, even the per capita expenditure at the local library and voter turnout at elections.

"It’s all publicly available information," said Monagan in a phone interview. "We try to find out as much information as we can on a town-by-town basis. The state police keep track of crime in every town. All the standardized test scores are available from the state Department of Education. Most of this information is available on the internet."

The numbers are compiled and scores are tallied.

"It’s completely objective," Monagan said. "There is no subjective consideration whatsoever."

Many first selectmen take the numbers quite seriously, and even call the magazine to question the ranking of their town.

"A woman from Newington called and wants us to come to her town’s next board meeting and go through the numbers with them," Monagan said. "They’re trying to understand how they went from ninth to 12th in two years."

In that sense, the editor said, the listing is used as "a civics tool."

"But," he added, "I think it’s more commonly used by people who are looking to move from one part of the state to another, or who are planning to move to Connecticut from another state. It’s the first step in determining where you might want to land."

Realtors in the Northwest Corner agreed, for the most part.

Elyse Harney, a Realtor at the real estate agency that bears her name, said two customers have already referred to the listing since it appeared on newsstands last week.

A longtime Salisbury resident, she noted that "I’ve known since the 1960s that Salisbury is the best place to live, but it is fun to show someone in a magazine how our town stacks up against other communities."

One of the clients who brought the article along to an appointment at the agency already owns a house in Salisbury and is considering a new home here. The other customers were a young couple who were not familiar with the area but had seen the listing and were swayed by it.

"It was nice for us to be able to discuss the article with them," Harney said, adding that her agents will keep copies of it on hand to show future clients.

John Borden, principle of Borden Realtors in Salisbury, agreed that the listing is most persuasive when customers don’t have any other knowledge of the Northwest Corner.

"Most people are familiar with the towns here because they know someone, or they went to school here," he said. But for shoppers who "come to Connecticut and don’t have a specific area or town in mind, it can be a starting point."

Jim Perkins, of the new Perkins Cole agency in Kent, said that most lists are "more of a curiousity" than a useful tool. Too often, he said, "their qualitications for recognition are based on ephemeral factors such as restaurants, scenic views, historical significance and so on."

However, some of the information included in the Connecticut magazine charts should be of great interest to buyers, he noted, as did John Harney Jr., principle broker for John Harney Associates, also in Salisbury.

"Buyers are very concerned with quality of life, schools, information of that sort on a town as they decide on where to purchase. Especially for first-time buyers (particularly weekenders), any information on a town can prove to be very important: the annual reports for a town are popular resources. Customers also look for census reports, mill rates for property taxes, recreational opportunities for children."

At the Web site of his mother Elyse Harmey’s agency, there are links to some sources of this sort of data.

For shoppers, or Northwest Corner residents who are just interested, annual reports are available at no cost from town halls. School testing information is available from the state Department of Education at state.ct.us/sde (look for CeDAR, or education data and research). Another excellent source of data of all sorts is the Connecticut Economic Resource Center at cerc.com, which includes statistics on everything from test scores to population to the top taxpayers.

The data on this and other sites is usually one to two years out of date. But, as Monagan pointed out, this type of information "stays fairly stable. These are not numbers that are going to fly all over the place. There’s just enough shifting to make it interesting."

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