Monument pedestal removal finalized and totalling over $1.5 million

Lindsey West

March 23, 2022

RICHMOND, Va. – The City of Richmond has allocated a total of more than $1.5 million for pedestal removal along Monument Avenue 20 months after the monuments atop of them have been removed and five months after the Robert E. Lee monument removal. Team Henry Enterprises is responsible for the removal and preservation of the pedestals which will be allocated according to The Black History Museum and The Valentine museum, said Greg Werkheiser, founding partner and attorney for Cultural Heritage Partners. 

The monument pedestals of Jefferson Davis, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Matthew F. Maury, and J.E.B. Stuart are being placed on plastic pallets rather than typical wooden pallets, causing the original price to increase $67,965.17, according to the City of Richmond. The A.P. Hill statue removal is also allocated within the budget and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources will manage the burial site. 

“It’s not really demolition, a lot of people think we’re destroying these [pedestals], but we’re preserving them,” said Mike Spence, construction superintendent for Team Henry Enterprises. “It begins with removing the stone pedestal itself and then getting down to a depth that the City of Richmond wants us to have.” 

with asphalt to create a thoroughfare, Spence said. 

Werkheiser believes voting majorities are more inclined to support the statue removal and understand the budget required to do so. 

“It seems like now there is a lot of recording of that dialogue back and forth but so much of that has developed just in the past year plus since George Floyd’s murder and those perspectives have changed so quickly from where they were for a long time,” Werkheiser said. “I should say the perspectives of the majority of people.”

Some have taken to social media to express distaste of the budget and pedestal removal. The arguments quote “wasting money” and needing to “preserve history.” Construction crews have experienced some negativity towards removing the statues but most responses have been in support. 

“The positives vice the negatives have been 85% positive, 15% negative,” Spence said. 

The “social cost” of the monuments’ symbolism outweighs that of the funds they required for proper removal, according to Werkheiser. 

“It has been especially high in an area like Richmond where other majority-minority cities are trying to deal with real issues and not to say that monuments aren’t a real issue but they are symbols and that symbolism is very weighty and very costly,” Werkheiser said. 

Blue Wooldridge, a former community associate of the Richmond Budget Office and VCU Professor Emeritus of the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, believes the budget for the pedestal removal is justified. 

“I assume the state spent some money helping put them up or taking care of them while they were up and the same people that didn’t want to spend money on taking down statues didn’t seem to have a great deal of a problem with money taking care of the statues that were up there, et cetera,” Wooldridge said. “I would assume that the amount of money that would be spent on removing, or was spent on removing the statues a small, very small fraction.” 

Questions regarding Richmond’s budget allocations have risen as a result of the pedestal removal price. The Richmond Department of Budget and Strategic Planning did not respond to an interview request. 

“They’ll probably downplay the amount anyway to minimize the objections and the conflict and so on but I cannot speculate who it is that’s not giving the information.” Wooldridge said. 

Public school budgets are of a concern to many Richmond residents and teachers are vouching for higher fund allocations. 

“It always comes down to the dollar.” said Justin Baber, a Richmond Virtual Academy 5th grade teacher, “It just seemed like a reaction. It seemed like a bandaid to an overall stemming problem that’s happening in the city.” 

The Richmond Public Schools Capital Improvement Plan budget for 2022 is $2.1 million and Baber has yet to feel the plan’s effects at a teacher level. 

“It seems like after the monuments were down it seemed like that was good enough,” Baber said. “That we could go ahead to the next thing and now we’re in this capital improvement plan and everything just seems like it's moving along at a pace that is deemed appropriate by our government and not by people who actually want certain things done in a certain way.

“The budgets are only fixing the problems now and they’re not looking toward the future.”