Anonymous donor ready to pay $125,000 cost for removing New Orleans' Confederate monuments
BY JEFF ADELSON
Sept. 16, 2015; 8:29 p.m.
It will cost about $125,000 to remove four controversial monuments to Confederate officials or a white supremacist uprising from their perches in New Orleans, and an anonymous donor has offered to foot the bill, according to Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s top aide.
The one-page report from Landrieu’s chief administrative officer, Andy Kopplin, was forwarded to the City Council this week along with similar short letters from other city department heads.
All the reports recommend the council vote to remove the four monuments that Landrieu has said should come down: the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Circle on St. Charles Avenue, the Jefferson Davis monument on Jefferson Davis Parkway, the P.G.T. Beauregard statue at the entrance to City Park and the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place on Iberville Street.
The recommendations are the final step the administration must take under a legal process spelled out in an ordinance that was crafted in 1993 as a means of removing the Liberty Place monument, originally on Canal Street. The marker celebrates an uprising by the white supremacist White League against the state’s biracial Reconstruction-era government in 1874 that left 34 people dead ...
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/politics/13465806-171/anonymous-donor-ready-to-pay
