President Obama will sign a public proclamation in January designating portions of the Civil Rights District in downtown Birmingham as a national historic monument, according to informed sources.

The signing, which is allowed under the Antiquities Act of 1906, is slated to occur in Washington, D.C.

The footprint of the historic area will include the A.G. Gaston Motel, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 16th Street Baptist Church, Masonic Temple, Bethel Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, and the 4th Avenue business district.

The area will be declared a national historic monument, rather than a national park because it is being created by presidential public proclamation. National historic parks may only be created by the U.S. Congress.

In March, Rep. Terri Sewell introduced a legislation to create a Birmingham Civil Rights National Historic Park with the aim of securing bipartisan support. The bill, however, is stalled in committee.

Sewell will presumably continue to push for Congressional approval of the national park designation, despite the presidential proclamation.

In October, during a visit to the district to Birmingham and Anniston by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis, Brent Leggs, senior field officer for preservation division for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, told AL.com that while national parks and national monuments are created differently, they are treated the same by the National Park Service.

The national monument proclamation is expected to ignite federal funding for the renovation of the A.G. Gaston Motel, located at 1510 5th Ave. North, as well as providing park rangers, technical assistance and marketing support designed to spur visitation to the area, Mayor William A. Bell has said.

The motel, which was built in 1954 and is owned by the city, has been closed since 1986 and is significant disrepair. The city deeded a small portion of the motel--as little as 20 feet--to the federal government, essentially the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. In order to qualify for federal funding, the National Park Service must own at least a small a small portion of the project.

Motel renovations will include a restaurant, classrooms, retail space and archival area for the Institute.

The National Park System says it received over 292 million visits to its sites in 2014, adding that those visitors spent $15.7 billion in areas within 60 miles of the park, and contributed 277,000 jobs (108,000 of which were in the hospitality industry--lodging, restaurants, and bars, according to the NPS).