Mayor says removing statues from Confederate monument will 'move this city forward'

Mayor Donna Deegan said her decision to remove statues from the Confederate monument in Springfield Park came after it became clear City Council was unwilling to take any action in the community debate over whether Confederate tributes should be in public spaces.

City Council members pledged two years ago they would take the lead by exploring a range of options, but they did not follow through by determining what the city should do.

"If I have the opportunity to move this city forward, I'm going to do that," Deegan said in an interview at her City Hall office after the removal of the statues Wednesday morning. "This is one of the things I promised to do, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do it."

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Deegan, a Democrat, faced a backlash from some Republican leaders. Dean Black, the chairman of the Republican Party of Duval County, and City Council member Nick Howland called it an "abuse of power" by Deegan because she did not seek council's approval. Gov. Ron DeSantis also ripped Deegan.

“The idea that we’re going to just erase history is wrong," he said Thursday in Ankeny, Iowa as reported by Florida Politics. "You’ve seen it now where they tried to take down Thomas Jefferson, they tried to take down George Washington off schools. It just gets so out of hand. So I don’t support taking down statues, particularly if you don’t have legal authority to do it."

The Republican-controlled state Legislature still could reverse the removal of Confederate monuments by Deegan and former Mayor Lenny Curry if lawmakers pass legislation that would stop Florida cities from acting on historic monuments and force the reinstallation of any moved in recent years.

Deegan, who told voters during her campaign she supported moving the monument in Springfield Park, said Jacksonville's strong-mayor form of government gave her the legal authority to act.

"I do have the opportunity to do some things through executive order, especially if I can't work through what I have really considered to be a very patient process with council," Deegan said.

She said she understands it's a tough political choice with public opinion split. She compared it to the decision by the city to expand its human rights ordinance to cover LGBT people in 2017 after years of debate.

"When we were looking at HRO, there were a lot of people who didn't want to see the HRO pass, but you can't always wait for public opinion to do what you think is the right thing," she said. "So I wasn't so much focused on the polls as much as I focused on what is the best thing for our city."

The HRO expansion occurred on a vote by City Council that Curry let become law without his signature. The removal of statues from the "Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy" monument differed in that it was a case of executive action.

Jacksonville group of business leaders praises decision

The Jacksonville Civic Council, a group of corporate and nonprofit leaders, praised the move by Deegan.

"Great progress can occur when we all unite around a common vision and move our city forward," Civic Council Board Chairman Eric Mann and CEO Dennis Whittle said in a statement. "To move forward, it is time we put the issue of Confederate monuments behind us."

They said the Civic Council has supported moving Confederate monuments from public land since 2017 and also proposed having public meetings so all sides share their views in forums with an independent moderator.

"Again, no action was taken," they said. "Today, action was taken. We applaud and support the mayor's decisive action."

The fate of the Springfield monument has been before City Council since it withdrew legislation filed by Curry in late 2021 for moving the entire monument — not just the statues — out of Springfield Park at an estimated cost of $1.3 million. Council members said at the time that withdrawing the bill would allow them to create a path forward for a decision.

Council members then committed that the future of Confederate monuments and markers in Jacksonville would be determined by them in summer 2022 after having a series of "community conversations."

The council did not hold any of the community conversations, however. When Curry proposed $500,000 in his 2022-23 budget for moving Confederate monuments, the council agreed to put the money in the capital improvements program but stipulated it could only be used after council undertook "community engagement" and decided what should happen to the monuments.

The conditions attached to the $500,000 did not stop Curry from taking down the obelisk in May 2023 for the Confederate monument in James Weldon Johnson Park in downtown. That came nearly three years after he directed the June 9, 2020, removal of the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier at the top of the monument. He did not seek council approval for either of those takedowns.

Deegan said she began talking three to four months ago with nonprofit leaders about the monument in Springfield Park and whether private fundraising could create the pool of money needed to remove the statutes.

"I know we shared the value of wanting this community to come together, and we all thought that was an important piece," Deegan said.

Deegan says rest of monument can stay after statue removal

ACON Construction had told the city in September 2021 it would cost $1.3 million to carefully cut the granite monument into smaller pieces in a way that the statues, slabs and columns could still be reassembled later at a different site if the city wanted that option.

Deegan said she didn't see a need to remove the entire monument that's been in Springfield Park since 1915.

"To me, that really was just simply a structure that held the statues," she said. "So I think we could repurpose that in a way we could create something unifying for our city."

By reducing the scope of the work, the cost dropped to $187,000 for removing just the bronze statues portraying a woman holding a Confederate flag on top of the monument and a woman reading to two children inside it.

The Jessie Ball duPont Fund and 904WARD, both Jacksonville nonprofit organizations, provided funding for the work, and 904WARD contracted with ACON Construction for the removal. Deegan gave the go-ahead for the work to happen.

No City Council member has voiced support for using taxpayer dollars to move the statues back to Springfield Park, but they have raised questions about what authority Deegan has to use private money for city purposes without getting council approval.

"I don't feel like there's an appetite from the council standpoint to put those back up," City Council President Ron Salem said. "I do think there is a lot of interest in exactly how she (Deegan) did this from a policy standpoint and how can we prevent it from occurring in the future."

"What's stopping the mayor from raising money and going into James Weldon Johnson Park and taking down the Charlie Bennett statue?" Salem said, referring to the statute of the long-time congressman.

He said he's going to file legislation that would clarify that donations of money and in-kind contributions must go before City Council for approval for exactly how they will be used.

Howland, who wrote that "Deegan is our Mayor, not our Monarch" on X while the statues were being removed, said any action on the monument should not have occurred until after council made a policy decision.

"My concerns are executive overreach and lack of transparency," Howland said. "To me, what we have to litigate here is whether there was abuse of executive authority."

Deegan said General Counsel Michael Fackler told her she had the legal authority to use the arrangement with the non-profit organizations. The mayor's office released a draft legal memorandum that put forward the legal reasoning.

The undated memo, which does not identify who wrote it, says the restrictions placed by council in 2022 on using the $500,000 in the capital improvement program do not apply to private money. By using "non-city" funding, the mayor can remove or relocate a monument from a city park because the mayor has "exclusive authority over the conduct of departments" in the city and "parks is one such department under executive branch control."

The city does encourage monetary donations to help pay for city activities. Donations for more than $500,000 must get approval by City Council and for donations of less than $500,000, the money goes into the city's general fund, according to long-standing provisions in the city's ordinance code.

The parks department has a community services trust fund that donors can support in order to pay for park enhancements, such as mowing the grass more frequently and adding programs, or for improving facilities at city parks.

Any expenditure from the trust fund exceeding $100,000 must get prior council approval, and the same goes for any in-kind donation with a value of more than $100,000.

Salem also wants to examine why removal of statutes from the Confederate monument did not first go through the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission for it to vote on a certificate of appropriateness.

The creation of the Springfield Historic District in 1992 cited the neighborhood's parks and monuments as "significant characteristics" of the district, but that ordinance did not specifically identify the Confederate monument as a "contributing structure" to the district, according to the draft legal memorandum.

The legal memo said it is the Office of General Counsel's opinion that Deegan does not need a certificate of appropriateness for the Confederate monument.

State lawmakers want to punish cities that remove monuments

While City Council members are calling on Fackler for more elaboration, the state Legislature will convene in January for a session that will bring up votes on legislation that could reverse what Curry and Deegan did on Confederate monuments.

Black, who serves in the state House in addition to being chairman of the Republican Party of Duval County, and state Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, filed related bills that would force local governments that remove historic monuments to cover the full cost for putting them back in their original condition.

Black's bill would enforce that requirement for any historic monuments removed since Jan. 1, 2017 while Martin would make it retroactive to Oct. 1, 2020.

Black wants the governor to be able to boot from office any local elected official involved in that removal, going back to January 2017. Martin would not give the governor the ability to retroactively punish an elected official, but it would allow that ejection from office after July 1, 2024.

Martin and Black use the same justification in their bills that the state must protect and preserve history from local officials who might be swayed by "undue influence by groups who may feel offended or hurt by certain actions" in the history of Florida and the nation.

Deegan said an attempt by state lawmakers to punish local elected officials for moving a monument would be unconstitutional.

"I cannot make decisions in this office based on fear of what somebody else is going to do," she said. "I came into this office to make a difference. I came into this office to try to unify this city, and that's what I'm going to do."

She said she thinks the business community and civic leadership of Jacksonville are with her about Confederate monuments on public spaces. The installation of the monument in Springfield Park occurred during the Jim Crow era of segregation with a system of laws that treated Black residents as second-class citizens.

Deegan said moving the statues means Jacksonville "has decided as a city that in a city park in a Black neighborhood, we're not going to elevate a time in our history (and) glorify a time in our history when those folks didn't even count as full people."

"That's not erasing history," she said. "That's simply saying, 'This is the value of what we place on where we are as a community.'"

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville decision on Confederate monument praised and attacked