Scott Sauyet's research
Original, sourced analysis on town budgets, regional school operations, state legislation, and other matters that come up in public deliberation.
Each report below is a longer, footnoted piece of work intended to inform a specific public conversation. Methodology and known data gaps are described inside each report; download links to underlying data accompany most of them.
A side-by-side reading of seven years of Andover budgets — General Government, the Andover Elementary School board budget, and the RHAM regional levy — with comparison against CPI inflation and Social Security COLAs. Includes year-by-year detail through Town Meeting and the May 5 referendum.
How Andover Elementary School's per-pupil spending compares to the 44 other Connecticut public school districts that share its structural profile: small-town, elementary-only districts (K–6 or K–8, enrollment under 2,000) that send middle- and high-school students to a regional district or by tuition contract. Built from the Connecticut State Department of Education's EdSight Per Pupil Expenditures report for school year 2024–25. Finds AES at the bottom of the rankings on essentially every measure of administrative spending.
Revenue, cost, and net-position figures for the Andover Elementary School preschool program: FY 2024–25 actuals from the audited financial filings, and FY 2025–26 anticipated figures from the Board of Education's monthly packets. Methodology and known data gaps are described inline.
Why the disputed preschool staff-benefit figure cannot be released — and why that refusal is the law rather than a stonewall. Walks through how small-cell aggregation can re-identify individuals, which privacy law applies on the student side (FERPA) and the staff side (Connecticut FOIA), and what each does and does not permit.
Where Andover's superintendent pay sits among Connecticut's elementary-only school districts. We analyze the superintendent contracts from all preK/K through 6/8 districts in the state, to determine how Dr. Bruneau's compensation compares to her peers.
What RHAM's class sizes actually are today, measured directly from the master schedule, compared to peer Connecticut secondary regional districts both historically (CT Mirror's 2012–13 dataset) and today (NCES 2024–25). Examines the gap between RHAM's enrollment decline and its staffing decline as the source of currently small classes.
Eleven years of Net Current Expenditures Per Pupil for RHAM and the seven other Connecticut regional districts that serve only secondary grades, with comparison against CPI-U inflation and the Social Security COLA. The headline +96.6% per-pupil increase over the decade is among the steepest in the peer group, but is overwhelmingly a denominator effect: enrollment fell 36.5% while total operating spending grew slower than inflation. Despite that, RHAM still ranks 6th of 8 on per-pupil spending in 2024–25.
Ten years of federal school-finance data (NCES/Census F-33) for Andover, Hebron, Marlborough, and RHAM, with maps and charts for every group examined. Combined spending for the four districts grew 17% over the decade while inflation rose 29.5% — yet per-pupil cost climbed 68%, because enrollment fell 30%. The report widens the lens step by step, from the core towns through three contiguous rings of neighbors to 45 elementary-only peer districts and the state as a whole, showing the same denominator arithmetic at every scale.
Every one of the 90 bills Rep. Steve Weir (R-55) introduced or cosponsored across his four sessions, 2023 through 2026, with the disposition of each resolved from the Connecticut legislative datasets and confirmed against the chaptered public acts. He put his name at the top of 41 bills and none became law; 24 he filed alone died in committee without a hearing. His name is nonetheless on 33 enacted laws, all as a cosponsor of committee bills. Traces what became of the four district projects behind his 2025 bond bills — the RHAM generator is being built on Hebron town money, not state money — and compares his record with the 125 other House members who served the same four years, his own 2023 freshman class, and the committee ranking members of each term.
A pattern analysis of the 1,351 roll-call votes Rep. Steve Weir (R-55) cast in the Connecticut House from 2023 through 2026, drawn from the General Assembly's official roll-call records. Covers his rate of agreement with his own caucus, issue-by-issue alignment, and the rare occasions on which he crossed over.
When Rep. Steve Weir (R-55) broke from his own caucus, he almost always broke to the right: 95 roll calls across 94 unique bills where a majority of House Republicans voted yes and he voted no, against just 3 breaks in the other direction. Itemizes those bills, including measures his caucus treated as routine, technical, or bipartisan.
A public-records analysis of the active business holdings of State Rep. Steve Weir (R-55), built from Connecticut Secretary of State filings, the Glastonbury and Hebron assessor databases, the Connecticut Apartment Association's own member directory, and contemporaneous reporting from CT Mirror and NBC Connecticut. Identifies seven business entities tied to him personally — including the $1.69M industrial parcel at 60 Village Place in Glastonbury that he himself describes as where he spends most of his time outside the legislature — and traces the May 6, 2026 demise of SB 274, the Concierge Apartments response bill, which never received a House vote after he and other Republicans threatened to run the clock out. Includes a four-session pattern review of his housing votes and a careful assessment of the Connecticut ethics-law question.
A walkthrough of Rep. Steve Weir's (R-55) May 2, 2026 vote on SB 1, the FY 2026–27 budget adjustment that directs roughly $270 million in new K-12 and municipal aid to Connecticut towns. Using the Lamont administration's town-by-town breakdown, the report estimates approximately $630,000 of that aid is headed to the five towns of the 55th. The bill passed 127–21; Weir voted no. Documents that the vote was not party-line — 26 of 47 voting Republicans voted yes, including neighbors from the 8th District — and points readers to Weir's own statements for the reasoning.
Where Rep. Steve Weir (R-55) falls on the ideological spectrum of the Connecticut House, and how that compares to the partisan lean of the district he represents. Every member is placed on a single liberal-to-conservative scale built from their recorded roll-call votes using W-NOMINATE, a standard spatial method, for the 2025–2026 term and, for comparison, 2023–2024. Each district's partisan lean is a recency- and turnout-weighted average of its towns' two-party vote for President, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Governor across the 2012–2024 general elections. The findings are stable across both of Weir's terms: he votes among the most conservative members of the House, to the right of his own party's leader, while the 55th leans Democratic in statewide and federal elections.
Every recorded House floor vote Rep. Steve Weir (R-55) cast from 2023 through 2026 — the four regular sessions plus the special sessions of September 2023, June 2024, and November 2025 — compiled directly from the Connecticut General Assembly's roll-call PDFs and presented as a single sortable table organized by session. Each row links out to the bill's tracking page, the official roll-call PDF, and (where available) the bill text, and shows both the chamber-wide totals and the party-caucus splits — with rows outlined where Weir voted against the majority of his own caucus. Every row is reconciled against its PDF's printed totals and cross-checked against the House Journals and CGA bill pages. CSV and JSON downloads of the full dataset are available alongside the HTML.
Connecticut measured against the rest of the country on 26 indicators at roughly 2010, 2019, and the latest available year — the span of unified state government — with every figure traced to a primary source (Census, BEA, BLS, EIA, FBI, NCHS/CDC, NCES and others) and checked against it before publication. The answer is genuinely mixed and the mix has a shape: the clearest gains are fiscal (a rainy day fund rebuilt from zero to its statutory cap, pension funding rising, a credit rating recovered through eight upgrades), the clearest strengths are inherited quality-of-life leads the rest of the country is steadily closing, and the clearest failures are costs and growth — taxes, electricity, housing production, population, and an overdose crisis that flipped Connecticut from better than the nation to worse.