Newtown Rated One Of State’s Best Towns

By John Voket

If you were considering a move to or within Connecticut, or your company decided to transfer you into the region and you were wondering which local towns offered the best opportunities, you might very well turn to Connecticut Magazine. Each year the publication produces its “Rating the Towns” edition, which incorporates dozens of different criteria to rank the state’s cities and towns on issues including crime, education, economy, and leisure opportunities.

In the latest edition, the magazine ranked Newtown as fifth among the 24 Connecticut communities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000. And while its scoring on points including cost of living and leisure services may have weighed the town’s ratings down below those of first place Glastonbury, and runners-up Westport, Cheshire, and New Milford, local residents can still boast the second best positions in the crime and economy categories, and the fifth best school system.

While First Selectman Herb Rosenthal and town Financial Director Benjamin Spragg have a hard time comparing Newtown to the former mill town of New Milford, both were pleased to see their community rise above neighboring Trumbull (ranked tenth) and the coastal community of Branford (sixth place).

“Considering our increasing grand list and the high family incomes, I can see how we scored fairly well,” Mr Rosenthal said of the ranking. The first selectman pointed out that besides consistently high ratings in the annual Connecticut Magazine poll, the international publication Money Magazine rated Newtown only one of two communities across New England in its “Best Places to Live” feature in 2003.

While Mr Rosenthal believes the Connecticut Magazine stats might be of interest to those looking for a quick snapshot of communities in the state, he does not think the ratings are telling longtime locals anything they do not know already.

“I suppose for people who move around more frequently that these kinds of ratings certainly contribute to our real estate values staying high,” he said. “But if a person is born in Newtown and plans to live here until they die, I don’t think these kinds of ratings are a factor.”

Newtown’s second best rating for overall economy was no surprise to Mr Spragg, whose office is piled high with reports and documents full of corroborating testimony to the community’s overall financial health.

“After reading this, I come away with a secure feeling about Newtown,” he said. “By these ratings, this town would be very attractive to me if I was moving into the state.”

Mr Spragg ticked off several factors that he thinks back up the magazines assertion.

“We are among the wealthiest in terms of our residents, our undesignated fund balance is well above the recommended ten percent, we’ve got a $2.8 billion grand list, tax collections at over 98 percent, and a 2.4 percent unemployment rate in September — well below the state average,” he stated.

Police Chief Michael Kehoe credits his department’s community policing and crime prevention initiatives as the primary forces behind Newtown’s second best rating in the crime category.

“The department takes great pride in its Community Policing efforts and especially its Crime Prevention programs,” the chief said. “The department delivers [our] DARE and other educational crime prevention programs in school settings. In addition, the department serves its citizens with Neighborhood Watch programs, Citizen Police Academies, TRIAD and other elderly crime prevention strategies, bank robbery and fraud protection meetings with out banking institutions, and makes a genuine commitment to reducing violence in the home through comprehensive and multiagency investigations.”

School Superintendent Evan Pitkoff had mixed feelings about the magazine’s rating Newtown’s education system fifth among its 24 competing communities.

“It’s nice to be ranked fifth, but I’ll be happier when we’re ranked fourth, and even happier when we are ranked first,” he said. “But the fact remains, these are quick hit ratings by a magazine. Look at the SAT scores [which contribute to the rating]. They don’t tell you the participation rate.”

Superintendent Pitkoff said the district prides itself on the high number of students taking the SAT tests each year.

“Communities that have fewer students taking the tests might score substantially higher,” he said. “I think reducing the entire scope of the education arena to just [test scores and graduation rates] doesn’t truly do our school system justice.”

On the flip side of the scale, Newtown’s consistently strong real estate market has driven the ranking for cost of living to the second highest, right behind tony Westport. Recent reports by local real estate agents currently put the median home price in Newtown at or above $450,000.

Torrington, Norwich, and East Hartford are this year’s lowest three communities in overall cost of living.

Leisure and culture also ranked considerably low at 13.5 among the 24 communities rated. However, that category takes into account local library expenditures per capita, the number of theaters, museums, festivals, concert venues, historic sites, colleges, golf courses, local newspapers, radio and television stations, state parks and forests, voter turnout in the 2000 election, and local restaurants.

Taking these wide-ranging criteria into consideration, it might easier to justify why communities like Westport, Groton, Middletown, and Stratford ranked among the best in the leisure/culture statistics.

Town Library Director Janet Woycik was not very pleased to see that library services spending per capita was among the lowest in Connecticut’s top communities. She believes the high number of library cardholders and the constant traffic flow through the Booth Library facility should justify a greater level of investment by the town.

“We get 80 percent of our funding from the town budget,” she said. “But when you consider we have more than 17,000 library card holders, and virtually every program is full, we hold meetings here every day and night, it’s a shame that we’ve had to cut back on things like books, DVDs, magazine subscriptions, and research materials because the town chose to fund us at a lower rate in 2004 than it did in 2003.”

While she admits that capital purchases provided by the Friends of the Library help defray those significant costs to patrons and taxpayers, she hopes the town will see fit to increase the library’s municipal funding in the coming year.

“I don’t think we are providing the level of services we should considering the number of library cards being held by members of the community,” Ms Woycik said.