When the Illinois Supreme Court decisively rejected Mayor Rahm Emanuel‘s plan to keep two city worker pension systems from going broke, City Halltold nervous credit-rating agencies it would have an alternate fix within weeks.

Nearly seven weeks later, Emanuel’s top aides have yet to propose any new ideas, much less file the state legislation that would be needed to make it reality.

Playing the waiting game are Wall Street analysts. Their pronouncements on Chicago’s creditworthiness determine how much it costs the city to borrow money, and they’ve already warned that further downgrades could be coming if there is no solution for the pension funds covering municipal workers and laborers.

Illinois’ mountain of unpaid bills is financially crushing some longtime vendors such as hospitals, dentists and nonprofits that specialize in caring for the sick and elderly.

With a budget deficit that could exceed $10 billion at the end of June and no resolution to a budget stalemate that’s nearly a year old, Illinois is holding back on paying longtime vendors, leading some to rethink the way they do business with state government. Some have stopped bidding on state contracts while others have been forced to cut costs and belt-tighten as they wait for their overdue payments.

Evanston’s two school districts will need to forfeit roughly a quarter million dollars each back to the state due to a calculation error announced last month by the Illinois Department of Revenue.

The errors are part of a misallocation of $168 million worth of tax revenue dispersed by the state to local governments since 2014. About 6,500 taxing districts throughout Illinois were affected by the error and Chicago taxing districts were hit hardest. While Chicago Public Schools is on the hook for about $23.5 million worth of overpaid tax revenue, most taxing bodies affected by the error owe overpayments totaling less than $10,000. A majority of taxing bodies north of Chicago, however, owe between slightly and substantially more than that figure. Personal property replacement taxes (PPRT) are collected by the state and passed on to local governments to replace money that was lost to them when the 1970 Illinois Constitution barred their ability to impose personal property taxes on corporations, partnerships and other business entities.

Bittner also send along this file: State Funding Data – FY 2009 through FY 2021 State Appropriations, Major ISBE General Funds Appropriations Including Pensions- Statewide and Chicago Public Schools  to back up her claim that CPS gets just 15 percent of state school aid in the current fiscal year.

The Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, on May 4 unveiled its plan to save Chicago Public Schools, or CPS.

Absent from the plan are structural reforms to ensure more money flows to the classroom, calls for cost savings in general, and any signs of awareness that Chicagoans are shouldering the largest property-tax increase in city history.

Instead, CTU is pushing for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax hikes.

During a speech at a suburban high school Monday, Gov. Bruce Rauner said Illinois lawmakers holding out for a change in the school funding formula were holding the state’s schools hostage.

“This year they’re screaming and saying, ‘It’s gotta change this year and it can’t go further.’ And they’ve threatened to hold up school funding and school openings in the fall for a new school funding formula,” Rauner said during the speech. “That’s wrong. Our schools shouldn’t be held hostage.”

Concerned about the fate awaiting the state of Illinois, some observers have warned that Puerto Rico’s fiscal distress and subsequent default is a preview of what could happen here. And Puerto Rico’s situation can indeed serve as a warning to the citizens of Illinois about the effects of fiscal indiscipline—indiscipline that has led to huge implicit debt in the form of unfunded pension obligations along with a large persistent structural deficit.

Aside from fiscal problems, Illinois and Puerto Rico are dissimilar in a number of important ways. Puerto Rico’s per capita income is less than half the U. S. average, while Illinois’ is slightly above the nation’s. Illinois’ economy is growing—albeit more slowly than the rest of the country in terms of employment and population—while Puerto Rico is experiencing a precipitous decline. Puerto Rico’s debt is currently selling at a 40% discount, while Illinois is still able to undertake borrowing at 2 percentage points above the most creditworthy states.

Puerto Rico’s response to its crisis appears to be limited to some type of de facto bankruptcy that would allow an orderly restructuring of its debt or a bail out by the federal government—a very unlikely event. Note that neither Puerto Rico nor the state of Illinois has direct access to bankruptcy under existing federal rules. Illinois’ options are considerably broader.