Dallas Landmark Committee Votes to Remove Confederate Monument

The Dallas Landmark Committee voted on Monday to approve the application to remove the Confederate Monument at Pioneer Cemetery.

The final vote from the committee was 10-5.

This comes less than a month after the Dallas City Council voted to remove the monument in an 11-4 vote.

Officials said last month that removal would be done carefully to avoid damage.

Removal of the monument can now be appealed to the Dallas Plan Commission since the monument and the location in the Pioneer Cemetery are both historic. 30 days are given for that appeal to be filed. The issue would then once again return to the City Council for a final decision, but the vote in February is a very strong indication of what that final decision will be.

If the process takes several months and drags past May city elections and a likely June run off, new City Council members could vote differently, but the strong majority Wednesday makes that unlikely.

Controversy has swirled for two years in Dallas over Confederate issues.

Removing the Confederate monument was delayed, even after a September 2017 city council vote that said Confederate monuments are against Dallas policy.

A 13 to 1 vote that month immediately removed the Robert E. Lee statue in Uptown. It remains is storage at Hensley Field.

Artist Lauren Wood, who has experience with such work, was recruited by city staff to consider a project that would "re-envision" the monument site in a new context.

Removing and storing the monument will cost around $480,000.

Protests against white supremacy and for the Lee statue were staged in 2017 with a large number of emotional people on both sides of the Confederate issues attending each one.

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