The City of Savannah announced today it received over 5,000 responses in its public survey about the future of Savannah’s Confederate Memorial in Forsyth Park, taken from Oct. 30-Nov. 13.
Authentication measures to weed out duplicate responses brought the number of verifiable single responses to 4,901.
2442 were residents, 2304 were non-residents, and 122 were of unknown residency.
Of residents who sent in responses online, via email, and via snail mail, nearly twice as many said “Do Nothing” to update or change the monument.
1564 said to take no action; while 878 said to do something about the Confederate Memorial.
Of residents that wanted to do something, 378 wanted to relocate the monument, 256 wanted to modify it, and 244 wanted to add interpretation.
Non-residents reflected an even more lopsided result, with 1961 wanting to do nothing, and 343 wanting to alter or remove the monument.
The Confederate Memorial public comment period was open from October 30, 2017 at 5 p.m. through November 13, 2017 at 5 p.m. The Confederate Memorial Task Force created earlier this year is scheduled to submit its recommendation in writing to the Mayor in early 2018.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2017.
Of course, since they didn’t get the results they wanted, now the poll is “not scientific” and will not “necessarily influence the results”. So you have an overwhelming majority (both residents and non-residents) who want it stay as it is, exactly where it is, but you still need to “look at what’s best”. There’s modern democracy in action for ya….