Council considers removing Confederate monuments after donor offers to pay

More importantly, however, is how the Landrieu administration has hand-picked what the city pays for when it comes to the monuments, which include PGT Beauregard’s City Park statue and Lee Circle, and what private donors pay for. The letter reported that the whole bill of upwards to $144,000 will be paid by a single person. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know where each of the council members stand. I know where I stand, and where I stand right now, I am likely to vote to remove the monuments”.

In the letter, Kopplin lambasted the Confederate statues. “True remembrance is required, not blind reverence”. Police Chief Michael Harrison, for instance, called the Confederate monuments “flashpoints for criminal activity and civil unrest”.

The estimated cost of removal has been estimated at $126,000 by the city’s Capital Projects Division (FOX 8 photo).

When Gray was asked what he would like to see the monuments replaced with, he replied, “I hope that it would be a statue or monument that first of all speaks to the unity of the people of the City of New Orleans, and to a great and bright future”.

Kopplin summed up his disgust with the monuments by claiming that the statues violate the city’s “moral compass”.

New Orleans joined a number of other Southern cities moving to eradicate Confederate and white supremacist symbols after the killings of nine worshippers at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. Jindal objected to the tearing down of history that the removal of the monuments represents. The council would have to vote on an ordinance before any monument could be moved or removed.

Whenever vandalism, or anything else happens, to any historical monuments in the city, they are the ones that come out and clean the monuments.