The delay in releasing the dash-cam video that shows the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald has sparked protests for change in Chicago and a new bill in Springfield.

House Bill 4355 would amend the Freedom of Information Act to require law enforcement agencies to prove an exemption is warranted via a court order. Or, to put it another way: Videos that are requested via the FOIA would have to be released unless a judge determines they are exempt under FOIA and should remain confidential.

The state of Illinois has gone without a comprehensive budget for six months, and that’s put pressure on all sorts of programs and departments the state spends money on, big and small.

COURTNEY CROWDER: Schools aren’t being paid for. Roads aren’t being paid for. But one fallout from that is that the Illinois State Fair butter sculptor has yet to be paid for her work.

CORNISH: That’s Courtney Crowder. She’s a reporter for The Des Moines Register, and she says Illinois still owes sculptor Sharon BuMann $2,500 for her butter cow. Now, not every state government has a line item for a butter cow. Sometimes it’s paid for by local dairy associations. But Crowder found that people will pay good money for a butter sculpture in other states like Iowa and Minnesota, like, more than $10,000.

Illinois legislative leaders said they made minor progress during a Tuesday meeting aimed at ending the state budget stalemate, including agreeing to take another shot at overhauling a public pension system that’s billions in debt.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, GOP leaders Sen. Christine Radogno and Rep. Jim Durkin, Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton sat down for the second time in as many weeks to try to end an impasse now in its sixth month.

Speaking to reporters afterward, Madigan, Radogno and Durkin described the meeting at Rauner’s office in Chicago as cordial and said they will meet again next week.

While the U.S. Department of Justice prepares to undertake its largest ever investigation of a domestic police department, a pending lawsuit by Chicago’s police unions has the potential to jeopardize hundreds of thousands of police records that could be used in the DOJ’s probe.

Last year, independent local journalist Jamie Kalven, whose reporting was credited with helping to unearth the Laquan McDonald police shooting video, won a lawsuit against the city to release a trove of police misconduct complaints. An Illinois Appeals Court had ruled that the city must honor Kalven’s Freedom of Information Act request and hand over police department misconduct complaints dating back to 1967. Following the court’s decision, Chicago’s two main newspapers, the Chicago Tribuneand Sun-Times, joined Kalven in requesting the files.

“The documents sought are not the underlying investigative files, but rather a list of every complaint and its disposition over the last 48 years. According to the city, the requested information comes to more than 7,000 pages,” Kalven wrote in an op-ed article for the Sun-Times.

Illinois has bent or broken every sound budgeting practice and should adopt reforms to help dig its way out of a huge pile of debt, according to a report released by the University of Illinois on Monday.

The report by the Fiscal Futures Project at the university’s Institute of Government & Public Affairs said the fifth-largest U.S. state “is badly in need of reform.”

Illinois has the lowest credit ratings and worst-funded pensions among all 50 states. An impasse between the Republican governor and Democrats who control the legislature has left Illinois without a budget halfway through fiscal 2016. The state’s unpaid bill backlog, a barometer of its chronic structural budget deficit, is projected to hit $8.5 billion by the end of this month.

To many, Illinois is a tale of two cities. Or rather, a city and the rest of the state.

Chicago is the economic and population anchor of Illinois. Chicago’s metropolitan area accounts for about three-fourths of the state’s population and nearly three-fourths of the state’s GDP. Greater Illinois, which extends 400 miles into the heartland from the shores of Lake Michigan, is often more referenced for state-level politics, college towns, and farming than business innovation.

But in this day and age, tech and startup success is no longer solely defined by a location on a map. Urbana-Champaign ranks in the top 10 for venture deals per capita, and has a tech ecosystem with direct connections to Silicon Valley. In Bloomington-Normal, the local tech scene is finding ways to make the towns’ economy more flexible. In Peoria local startups are connecting with local long standing businesses to drive innovation.

Weary Illinoisans are growing used to being at the top of just about everyone’s worst-in-the-nation list.

Consider, for example, that the latest U.S. Census Bureau data show the state has lost 9,972 people from 2013-2014. That puts us No. 1 in population decline by a wide margin among the six states which recorded a drop — West Virginia was next, with a loss of 3,269. Meanwhile, nationwide the population grew by 1 percent.

Making matters worse is that our challenging climate doesn’t appear to be causing the exodus. Many of the people leaving Illinois are moving to neighboring states, some of which endure far rougher winters than we do.

The head of the Independent Police Review Authority said Tuesday that she wants an agency besides her own to look into the conduct of the officers at the scene of the Laquan McDonald shooting, but she vowed to reinvestigate another controversial police case involving a video.

Sharon Fairley called on City Hall’s Inspector General Joseph Ferguson to investigate questions surrounding Officer Jason Van Dyke’s fatal shooting of McDonald, 17, on Oct. 20, 2014.

Days before the Chicago Teachers Union takes a vote to see how many teachers are willing to strike, the Board of Education formally rejected a union request to enter the next stage of contract talks.

On Monday, the CTU filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board, saying they’re ready to enlist the negotiating help of a fact-finding panel that’s part of a lengthy process laid out by state law. The union had asked Chicago Public Schools in late November to seek the fact-finder to hammer out a new contract to replace the one that expired on June 30. Under that law, the union couldn’t go on strike until at least March.

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The Lincolnshire Village Board might soon give unionized employees who work at private companies inside village boundaries the choice of whether or not to pay union dues.

And a variety of interests from outside their boundaries might gather in Village Hall, either to support or protest the move.

At a meeting on Dec. 14, trustees are expected to consider an ordinance that, if approved, would make Lincolnshire a “right-to-work” zone, according to the village. The law would allow workers in village limits to opt out of paying union dues.