The mayor of Baltimore wants to explore the possibility of removing monuments to figures from the Confederacy, “following in the footsteps of New Orleans”.

Catherine Pugh told the Baltimore Sun the city could save money by auctioning off the monuments.

“The city does want to remove these,” Pugh said. “We will take a closer look at how we go about following in the footsteps of New Orleans.”

New Orleans recently removed three prominent statues of Confederate figures – of President Jefferson Davis and two generals, PGT Beauregard and Robert E Lee – and a monument heralding white supremacy. The removals, mostly carried out overnight and with strict security, attracted protests and some arrests but not the widespread unrest some feared.

“You name it,” Pugh said of Baltimore’s plans, “we’ve tackled it. This is another one of those things that we will tackle as well. New Orleans has taken on this issue. It costs about $200,000 a statute to tear them down … Maybe we can auction them?”

A commission appointed by the previous Baltimore mayor recommended removing a monument to Roger B Taney, a Marylander who wrote the 1856 Dred Scott supreme court ruling that denied citizenship to African Americans, and a statue of two Virginians, Confederate generals Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

The Roger B Taney monument is located on Mount Vernon Place, while the Lee and Jackson monument is in Wyman Park Dell.

Citing cost concerns, former mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake left the decision to her successor, settling for the erection of signs on the statues and other monuments that described “a propaganda campaign of national pro-Confederate organizations to perpetuate the beliefs of white supremacy, falsify history and support segregation and racial intimidation”.

Rawlings-Blake appointed the commission after the June 2015 fatal shootings of nine parishioners at a South Carolina African American church by a gunman who posted pictures of himself with the Confederate battle flag.

In some states, partisan feelings over the removal of the New Orleans statues has run high. This week, a Mississippi lawmaker said in a social media post that anyone seeking to “destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY … should be LYNCHED!” The post was taken down.

New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “If we take down the monuments and don’t take away the attitude that put the monuments up or that allowed them to stay there, we really wouldn’t have done much as a country.

“And so hopefully, the people of New Orleans will use this as an opportunity to reach into our past, tell our whole history, and then prepare for the future in a way that makes sense to us.”

Support for the statues is likely to be less fiercely expressed in Maryland than in a southern state such as Louisiana, although national pro-Confederate groups protested the New Orleans removals.

Maryland, a slave-owning state, remained in the union during the civil war, which was fought from 1861 to 1865. Rawlings-Blake’s commission noted that though 65,000 Marylanders fought for the north, 22,000 fought for the Confederacy. The city of Baltimore contains only one public monument to the union.

