City gets single, expensive bid to remove Confederate monuments
10th April 2017 · 0 Comments
On the same day that marked the deadline for submitting bids for the contract to remove three Confederate-era monuments in New Orleans, city officials announced that the project, which has been in the works since the City Council voted in December 2015 to remove them, will be a lot costlier than previously anticipated.
City officials said only one entity submitted a bid that triples the $170,000 donated anonymously to pay for the project to relocate the Battle of Liberty Place monument and statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard.
The total cost will be even higher since the Battle of Liberty Place project will be bid on separately.
The bid for the three Confederate monuments, submitted by Couzan Services LLC, will cost the City of New Orleans $600,000.
That news, a major setback for City officials who said they wanted to have the monuments moved to a city-owned warehouse by May 19, comes as the Monumental Task Committee takes its efforts to block the removal of the monuments back to the Louisiana Legislature after two unsuccessful attempts to pass a bill last session and several fruitless court challenges to the City Council vote to remove the monuments.
The $170,000 raised privately to fund the statue-removal project falls far short of what Couzan Services LLC. says it will cost to carry out the work, throwing another major snag in the City’s plan to move forward after two federal court rulings in early March that cleared the way for the work to finally get under way.
Referring to the high cost of carrying out the project, Landrieu administration spokesman Tyronne Walker told Nola.com, “Given threats and violent acts towards previous contractors, we understand the increased costs can be due to increased risks. We remain committed to taking down the Confederate monuments and securing the funds necessary to do so. The city has 45 days to award that contract.”
According to Nola.com, the bid puts the cost of removing the two smaller monuments — those of Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard — at $150, each, but it will be considerably more costly to remove the Robert E. Lee monument at Lee Circle.
The City of New Orleans had to begin searching for a new contractor to handle to statue-removal project after Baton Rouge-based H&O Investments backed out of the project last year after the company owner and his wife received death threats. H&O Investments also had to deal with threats from clients who said they would terminate their contracts with the company if it carried out the statue removal project. Also, a Lamborghini that belonged to the company owner was torched last year in the parking lot of the company last year, although it has never been proven that the incident was connected to the statue-removal project.
The City of New Orleans opened the bidding process last year but decided to conceal the names and contact information of prospective bidders after a group called Save Our Circle organized a phone campaign that targeted prospective bidders and pressured them to back away from the statue-removal project.
Eventually, the Landrieu administration decided to halt the bidding process altogether until the fate of the Confederate-era monuments was resolved in the courts.
That resolution came with a unanimous decision by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier’s ruling that allows the City of New Orleans to remove all four monuments.
The fate of the Battle of Liberty Place monument had been decided separately because of a federal court order dating back to the 1990s.
Local grassroots organizations and civil rights groups have called for the removal of the Confederate-era monuments for the greater part of the 20th century but those efforts picked up steam in the 1950s and 1960s as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum.
There were renewed efforts to remove the Battle of Liberty Place monument in the 1990s, along with efforts to remove the names of slave-owners from the majority-Black city’s public schools.
Last year, Take Em Down Nola led a protest that attempted to dismantle the iconic statue of Andrew Jackson at Jackson Square. Seven people were arrested during the protest, which was attended briefly by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
Duke, a former Louisiana gubernatorial candidate, was one of the central figures who successfully blocked efforts to remove the Battle of Liberty Place monument from public space in the early 1990s.
Pierre McGraw, president of the Monumental Task Committee, said Tuesday that the single bid to carry out the project speaks to “the unpopularity of removing historical features of New Orleans.
“It is obvious to all except the mayor that very few people want these monuments hidden away,” McGraw added. “The Monumental Task Committee firmly supports spending the budgeted money, which falls far short of the bid, to put up new monuments instead of tearing down nationally recognized and citizen-funded landmarks.”
One of the groups spearheading efforts to take down not just the four Confederate-era monuments voted on by the New Orleans City Council but also other “racially offensive” statues like those of New Orleans founder Sieur de Bienville, Justice E.D. White and former U.S. President Andrew Jackson, also issued a statement last week regarding the latest development in ongoing efforts to remove the monuments from public spaces across the city.
“We of the Take ‘Em Down coalition condemn this entirely phony bid rigging by the Landrieu administration and the Monumental Task Force Committee,” Take ‘Em Down Nola said in a statement Tuesday. “White supremacists have forced potential vendors to boycott this round of efforts to remove these monuments to white supremacy. That the city received only one bid for an outrageous price speaks to that collusion.
“We continue to demand that these monuments come down and we think that the city has the wherewithal within its own workforce to execute this task. We call upon the Landrieu administration to move forward by hiring structural engineering firms to advise the city workers on the proper procedures for removal. Further delay only strengthens the resolve of the white supremacists dedicated to the maintenance of these abhorrent statues.”
The Landrieu administration responded emphatically to criticism from Take ‘Em Down Nola with Landrieu spokesman Tyronne Walker issuing a statement that said, “There is no one in this city that has worked harder to take down these four Confederate monuments than this administration. We have been steadfast in our efforts and are committed to taking down the monuments as quickly as possible.”
Walker also said that plans “to issue the issue the contract within 45 days, if not sooner.”
“It is a fact that some groups have engaged in intimidation and violence as a means to prevent progress, but we will not be intimidated,” Walker said. “Mayor Landrieu is committed to ensuring that we deliver on this important issue and take these monuments down.”
This article originally published in the April 10, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
