EDITOR'S PICK

Two bidders who sought Charlottesville's Lee statue file letter protesting plan to melt it down

BY TYLER HAMMEL The Daily Progress 10 hrs ago

Two bidders who sought Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee monument have filed a protest letter, charging that the bid process to rid the city of Lee’s statue was “disastrously arbitrary” and that it resulted in a “capricious, illegal award.”

Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation, on behalf of its subsidiary Ellenbrook Museum, filed the letter Dec. 14. The foundations are represented by attorney Ralph Main, who also represented various Charlottesville area residents in a previous Monument Fund-backed lawsuit against the city over votes to remove the Lee and Jackson statues.

“Instead of transparent: opaque. Instead of regular and managed: improvised and lawless. Instead of careful and fair consideration: a cursory midnight discussion and preconcerted effort to flout the legislative limit on City Council’s authority,” Main wrote in the letter to the city.

The protest letter comes in response to the city council vote on Dec. 7 to accept a bid from the Jefferson School American Heritage Center to melt down the Lee statue and then commission a new piece of community art. Many hailed the council decision as visionary and the Jefferson School plan as hopeful, a way for the city to move beyond the violence and divisiveness that the Lee statue has engendered over the years.

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According to the bid protest letter, the award to the Jefferson School was illegal and the award/voting process violated various state and local procedures.

Main also argues that the city does not have the authority to destroy a statue, directly or indirectly, based on unsuccessful attempts in 2020 to amend the state code to allow localities to alter or destroy monuments. It remains unclear whether donating a monument to a group that wishes to destroy or alter it does indeed violate the updated state code.

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