* The first video gaming license has been issued…

Mary Callisen had just wrapped up her Wednesday lunch shift at the Bringer Inn in Morton Grove when the waitress walked to a back room, perched on a stool and slipped $20 into a blinking video gambling machine.

“This is going to eat my money real fast,” Callisen joked midway through a hand of electronic poker. “But it’s fun.”

The neighborhood tavern became the first in Illinois to offer legalized video gambling when state regulators brought its five machines online late last week as part of a test to make sure a centralized computer system is working correctly before a statewide rollout that’s been more than three years in the making.

Video gambling is expected to go live at bars, restaurants, truck stops and fraternal organizations in a matter of weeks, according to an Illinois Gaming Board spokesman.

“We are in the preliminary phase now,” said spokesman Gene O’Shea, who added that more testing sites will come online in the coming days. As of Wednesday, machines were making legal payouts at two locations — Bringer Inn and Opsahl’s Tavern in Rockford.

* But Chicago’s speed cameras won’t be deployed for months because of a big problem with state law…

A quirk in Illinois traffic laws has complicated Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to pepper the city with speed cameras and slowed down bidding on a multimillion-dollar system scheduled to begin issuing $100 tickets by early next year.

The problem: a 38-year-old opinion by the Illinois attorney general that says children must be “visibly present” before school zone speed limits can be enforced.

What that means is those robotic safety-zone cameras must not only capture high-definition images of speeding cars and their license plates, they also must seek out and photograph a child as much as a football field’s distance away — preferably in the same shot.

The legal technicality was not addressed when Emanuel persuaded state lawmakers and Chicago aldermen to quickly give City Hall authority to tag speeders near schools and parks in new safety zones that could cover half the city. The mayor argued that a crisis of pedestrian accidents required a quick response, though a Tribune analysis raised doubts about his claims.

Now the bidding process has revealed the complication, which presents both technological and legal issues.

Heh.

* And now this…

The private firm that runs the Illinois Lottery should not have to pay roughly $25 million in potential penalties for failing to meet profit targets in its state contract, according to an independent mediator.

Two years ago Northstar Lottery Group LLC won an intense bidding war to run the multibillion-dollar lottery by promising substantially higher profits than its competitor did. It was the first contract of its kind in the nation, now being emulated by Indiana and other states to boost performance.

Though the lottery’s profits improved last year, the Chicago-based firm fell at least $50 million short of projections, triggering a penalty equal to half the difference. Under its private management agreement (PMA) with the state, the firm gets a bonus if it exceeds the profit target, on top of other payments and incentives.

But after months of deliberations, an independent mediator has tentatively decided that “certain actions by the state” entitled Northstar to adjust its profit targets down by $55.6 million in the year ended June 30, substantially reducing or perhaps eliminating any penalties it may owe. The mediator also said Northstar could reduce this year’s profit target by $20.2 million.

This was a preliminary ruling and the state is pressing hard to get the mediator to change his mind. If not, court action is likely.