Come March, maybe sooner, it will be as though the Robert E. Lee statue in Oak Lawn Park never existed.

Alexander Phimister Proctor's 1935 statue Robert E. Lee and Young Soldier overlooking Turtle Creek Boulevard was removed in September 2017. Beginning today, the city will finally begin removing the plinth upon which the work was perched at its installation in June 1936, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was present in Dallas for its unveiling.

In a release issued this morning, Dallas City Hall said the Texas Pink Granite base — designed by Dallas architect Mark Lemmon — will be "disassembled and archived in a secure location" on city property. The statue itself is in storage at Hensley Field, the former Naval Air Station on Mountain Creek Lake, biding its time in a crate made of plywood and Plexiglas.

In a memo sent today to the Dallas City Council, Assistant City Manager Joey Zapata said removal will cost around $180,000. Of that, about $25,000 will go toward the conservation team overseeing its deconstruction and $155,000 is set to be spent on removal and transportation costs. The Park and Recreation Department will spend an additional $30,000 landscaping the site.

"Although City Council action is not necessary at this point," Zapata writes, "staff will recommend additional funding for these unplanned expenditures" by the end of the fiscal year, which wraps at the end of September. Zapata said via text that the money will come from appropriations amendments stemming from "savings, revenues or contingency" dollars in the Park and Recreation Department and the Office of Cultural Affairs — in other words, budgeted and unspent funds.

The city spent more than $400,000 just to have the statue removed — a process delayed by a last-second court order and a deadly crash involving a crane hired to transport the Confederate monument. That price tag does not include indirect costs, such as the overtime paid Dallas police officers who kept eye over the park, plinth and protests that took place before and after the statue's removal.

Several council members have been pushing for the plinth's removal for more than a year; one, Pleasant Grove's Rickey Callahan, had hoped the statue might one day be returned to its perch in the park. In the memo, Zapata reminded the council that City Manager T.C. Broadnax told them in July that he was "assessing proposals and options" for its removal.

Activist John Fullwinder, who has been campaigning for the removal of the Confederate monuments for several years, said the announcement was, in a word, "great."

"This shows that the Lee takedown is permanent, that it will not be reversed as some Confederacy buffs have advocated," he said. "It also suggests that the days are numbered for the Confederate monument downtown. Not without struggle, but maybe Dallas will move into the 21st century after all."

In the memo, Zapata wrote that the conservation team has already prepared a preliminary report, which the Public Art Program, within the Office of Cultural Affairs, has approved. The consultant is now coming up with a plan on how to best store the base, he said.

Jennifer Scripps, head of the Office of Cultural Affairs, said Michael van Enter — the conservator who oversaw removal of the statue — is also in charge of the plinth disassembly to ensure that the process follows historical preservation guidelines. Phoenix 1, a restoration and construction company also involved in the makeovers at Dealey Plaza and the old Municipal Building downtown, will handle the removal.

And that disassembling begins immediately: The area is being fenced off today, cutting off access to all but the work crews. They will begin by removing the seating area, then they'll move to the plinth and steps leading to the perch.

Perhaps anticipating push-back to its removal and protests like the one that took place Sept. 16, 2017, when a group touting Confederate flags and long guns came to Oak Lawn to place flowers on the plinth, Zapata wrote in the memo, "additional support will be provided by DPD as needed."

1 / 3The plinth where a statue of Robert E. Lee stands empty at Oak Lawn park in Dallas on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019. In the coming weeks, work will begin to remove the plinth after the statue was removed in 2017.(Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3People gathered around the Robert E. Lee statue base in September 2017 to hear speeches during the This Is Texas Freedom Force protest over removal of the statue from Lee Park.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3Few people have seen what became of Alexander Phimister Proctor's statue of Robert E. Lee and a young soldier since its removal from the park formerly known as Lee Park, where it stood for over 80 years until its removal in September 2017. On Dec. 20, 2018, The Dallas Morning News got a behind-the-scenes look at the secure storage area where the statue is being kept at Hensley Field, the former Naval Air Station on the west side of Mountain Creek Lake in Dallas.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Following the plinth's removal, parks crews will begin replacing the landscaping where the statue once stood. Zapata said work should be "fully completed with seven weeks."

At one point, the council briefly looked at selling the Lee statue or loaning it to a museum — perhaps to the Texas Civil War Museum in White Settlement, outside Fort Worth. But that proposal was scrapped, in part because the museum doesn't provide the "full historical context of the Civil War, Reconstruction, 'Lost Cause' mythology, and the 'Jim Crow' era" — a demand of the Dallas Mayor's Task Force on Confederate Monuments.

Today's release does nothing to address the fate of the Confederate War Memorial outside the downtown convention center, which the council could consider again this spring. But coincidentally, the announcement does come on the day a Confederate monuments working group is scheduled to meet at Fair Park for a second time to discuss, among other things, creation of a memorial to victims of lynching in Dallas County.