And don't come to the courthouse to pay a fine.

Exactly.

We've got these Bitcoin ATMs that are conveniently located at your local vape shop.

And I think they at first wanted like 10 grand or something like that.

And then she was like, I don't have 10 grand.

And then she talked them down to a thousand bucks.

So she scoops up her little kid, goes to the bank, withdraws a thousand dollars, goes to the vape shop as instructed, still on the phone with the person purporting to be the the deputy, and she's inserting the cash into the Bitcoin ATM at the vape shop.

Was she able to retain her money?

It's

even more.

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly.

No, I think she's probably on the record, if I remember correctly, saying that police, as well as everyone else who works for the city, is underpaid.

But what she's concerned about is kind of the way that this was done, which we just talked about, but also the way that this is going to really have a big impact on the city's budget.

So the city, based off this new state control law, in a few years, they're going to have to spend 25% of their budget on police.

I think we now know that's not necessarily how this is going to work.

Why do you think Tashara Jones is in the fight of her life?

Yeah, that's such a good question.

I think it definitely has something to do with the fact that these two bits of good news, the crime truly being down and these this big sums of money that the city kind of lucked into in a way.

They're kind of a mixed bag for whoever's in charge because on the one hand, everyone knows about the hundreds of millions of dollars that the city has.

But yet, you know, the streets still aren't plowed or there's still potholes on the streets or the trash isn't getting picked up.

So it kind of throws sort of salt in the wind or sort of exacerbates these sort of annoyances that city residents have, like, We have all this money and yet there's still these quality of life issues.

And same with the crime.

Do you think either of them is well-positioned to make this an issue and to ride this to victory?

Why is it coming up now?

the volunteer lawyers and accountants for the arts.

Their former director, as of a few years ago, Sue Greenberg, she basically got together with some law students at St. Louis University Law School, and they're basically just trying to figure out, okay, how can we get some more funding for public arts? And from what I understand, it sounds like one of these law students was literally dusting off the old parchment, and was like, oh, here's this thing back here that would do exactly what we wanted it to do.

But they themselves were the first to realize, oh, well, this is unenforceable.

For complicated reasons, people should read the story if they want to sort of figure out why this was perhaps doomed to fail from the beginning.

But they saw that there was sort of, at least on paper, like a will to give 1% of city construction to a public arts fund.

And...

But do we have any sense of whether Mayor Kara Spencer is interested in trying to fix this, get this happening on top of everything else? It seems like there's a lot going on at City Hall these days.