Funeral services for former Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who died on Nov. 20 at the age of 78, are being held Tuesday in Hartford. Rell, a Republican, led the state from July 2004 to 2011.

The public may pay respects to the late governor from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Connecticut state Capitol in Hartford. A mass for Rell will follow at 2:30 p.m. in the Cathedral of Saint Joseph, located at 140 Farmington Ave.

Traffic is expected to be impacted in Hartford by the large attendance. Farmington Avenue will be closed between Broad Street and Sigourney Street from about 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., police said.

A leader of ‘honesty and openness’

Rell was Connecticut’s second female governor and took the role at a difficult time. She was lieutenant governor when former Gov. John Rowland abruptly resigned in 2004 during a corruption investigation.

“I worked hard every day, and I sought to do things because I wanted to do them right and for the right reasons,” Rell said when her official governor’s portrait was unveiled in 2013.

“She governed with honesty and openness,” former Republican State Sen. John McKinney said at the 2013 unveiling event. “She governed with class and character, and that, to me, is the great legacy of Jodi Rell.”

Several current and former lawmakers shared a similar sentiment following her death. Gov. Ned Lamont credited Rell with bringing stability to the state’s government – and rebuilding trust with residents.

“The Jodi Rell that the people of Connecticut saw in public was the Jodi Rell that she was in real life — calm, rational, caring, approachable, and devoted to her family and to her state,” Lamont said in a statement after her death.

Rell was a longtime Brookfield, Connecticut, resident. Prior to becoming lieutenant governor, she represented Brookfield in the state House of Representatives. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and attended Old Dominion University and Western Connecticut State University.

Private burial planned

Lamont’s office said Rell will be laid to rest at another date in a private ceremony at the Connecticut State Veterans Cemetery in Middletown, alongside her husband, Lou Rell, who was a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Flags, which had been flying at half-staff since Rell’s death was announced, will return to full-staff at sunset Tuesday evening.

This story will be updated. Connecticut Public Radio’s Patrick Skahill contributed to this report.

Gov. Ned Lamont and the state’s two elected fiscal officers, the treasurer and comptroller, reported Monday that Connecticut’s once-neglected state-employee pension system is now 55% funded — up from 38% eight years ago, but still a national laggard.

Additional contributions and better investment returns produced gains of $2.7 billion in the state employees retirement system and a similar gain in the separate teachers’ system, which is now 62.3% funded. But the officials warned the state needs to continue the progress.

“It means we’ve gone from being the third-worst-funded pension in the country to the sixth-worst,” Lamont said. “We have a long way to go, and the rest of the country is watching.”

Connecticut is one of six states with a state employees pension fund less than 60% funded, a consequence of decades of neglect: No state contributions were made to the fund from its creation in 1939 to 1971, then inadequate support until Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took office in 2011.

Lamont, Treasurer Erick Russell and Comptroller Sean Scanlon, all Democrats, said the latest pension fund valuations demonstrate that various reforms begun during the Malloy administration and accelerated by Lamont are paying off, but true stability is years away. 

“It takes a long time to dig out of this hole,” Russell said.

For the past 13 years, the state has met the basic standard of making actuarially determined contributions. More recently, it also has seen far better returns on the investment of pension funds, and it’s used six straight years of budget surpluses to reduce the unfunded liability.

“I think we have made incredible progress as a state,” Scanlon said.

“I think we’ve shown we can manage our house,” Lamont said. 

The celebration by Lamont, Russell and Scanlon comes a month before the General Assembly is scheduled to open its annual session and begin a debate on whether the state can afford to loosen the spending controls collectively known as the “fiscal guardrails.”

A volatility cap and other restrictions imposed in 2017 and unanimously renewed last year have required setting aside $4 billion as a budget reserve and using another $8.5 billion in surplus funds to reduce the unfunded pension liability, frustrating advocates who see mounting unmet needs in a time of relative plenty. 

Paying down the unfunded liability has immediate and longterm benefits: Without the added investment over the last few years, the required pension contributions in the next fiscal year would have been about $737 million higher, and the projected savings to taxpayers over the next 25 years are about $18 billion, Scanlon said.

Leaders of the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly, as well as a wide range of advocacy groups, are expected to urge Lamont to recalibrate the volatility cap to allow some surplus funds to be spent. On Monday, Lamont offered them little encouragement.

Lamont pronounced himself “strict” on the question of maintaining the guardrails, while repeatedly refusing to say if he already has decided to propose a budget that will maintain the caps as currently written. Lamont will make a “State of the State” address on Jan. 8 then make his budget proposal a month later.

His only promise was to propose “an honestly balanced budget.”

“We haven’t done that for 30 years in the state, until the last six or seven years. I don’t want a lot of assumptions that just create a hole in the out years. I want to make sure that we have a balanced budget for our kids going forward as well,” Lamont said. “I’m a little surprised — sometimes people say we’ll spend a lot more now and we’ll figure out how to pay for it later. I think that’s the type of credit card mentality that got the state with big problems over the last 30 years. I’m not gonna let it happen again.”

Democrats won majorities of 25-11 in the Senate and 102-49 in the House last month, each veto-proof margins. But there are moderate Democrats who could join minority Republicans in upholding any Lamont veto of changes to the guardrails. Senate Republicans immediately issued a statement urging Lamont to be resolute.

Connecticut for All, a coalition of 60 community, faith, labor and nonprofit groups, said Lamont and the lawmakers have to balance fiscal responsibility against social needs.

“The last several budget cycles have been irresponsibly unbalanced, leaving working families unnecessarily burdened and blocking needed investments in our communities’ futures,” said Norma Martinez-HoSang, the group’s director. “You don’t make extra car payments when your vehicle is missing an engine. It’s time to get Connecticut back on the road with fiscal policies that are responsive to our current financial state and the needs of our state.”

Management of the pension is somewhat separate from the question of adjusting the guardrails. While the requirements of the volatility cap have accelerated paying down the unfunded liability, the pension funds’ fiscal stability has benefitted from other unrelated reforms that Russell and Scanlon say must be preserved.

They included the basic one of making the annual actuarially required contributions, as well as eschewing a gimmick that lawmakers once used to artificially lower those  required contributions — assuming an artificially high rate of return on investments.

“We have to make sure we protect this culture and never allow ourselves to return to habits of ignoring our obligations,” Russell said.

The state once assumed a rate of return of 8.5%, far beyond the actual returns. In 2019, it lowered the assumed returns to 6.9%. The lower the assumed returns, the higher the annual required contribution to make up the difference.

Over the past two years, changes in investment strategies have yielded better returns.

“We’ve gone from being one of the worst performing pension funds over the last 30 years to being in the top quartile, and that makes an enormous difference,” Lamont said.

State police arrested a man who they said was going 122 miles per hour on Interstate 91 in Wallingford on Friday night, then changed the license plates on his car in an effort to avoid being found.

A state trooper who was conducting speed enforcement on I-91 North saw a gray Hyundai going much faster than the speed limit around 7:47 p.m. and clocked it at 98 miles per hour, according to state police.

When state police tried to stop the driver, he kept going, sped up to 122 miles per hour, and was weaving in and out of traffic, nearly hitting other vehicles, state police said.

State police then turned off the lights and sirens, went to the home of the registered owner of the vehicle in Waterbury, where they found the car with a Florida plate that didn’t belong to the vehicle, police said.

The driver admitted to troopers that he was driving the vehicle and changed the plate when he got home so police could not find it, police said.

He was charged with reckless driving, operating under suspension, engaging police in a pursuit and interfering with an officer.

He was held on a $20,000 bond.