The Confederate War Memorial, located near Dallas’ City Hall, is one major step closer to coming down.

The city’s Landmark Commission on Monday voted 10-5 to approve the removal, upholding the City Council’s view of the monument as “non-contributing to the historic overlay district” of Pioneer Park Cemetery — adjacent to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center — where the memorial has sat since 1961.

The decision essentially gives the city a green light to bring the statue down, but that might not happen anytime soon. An interested person can appeal the case to the City Plan Commission within 30 days. And whoever loses that case — the city or the interested person — could file a lawsuit in district court.

But the Landmark Commission was a significant hurdle. The City Council made its sentiment known last month, but preservationists have looked favorably upon the 123-year-old memorial in a landmark cemetery.

After a morning briefing, the commission spent over 2 ½ hours deliberating the memorial’s removal, listening to pro-monument speakers and parsing over the city’s arguments that the memorial wasn’t covered by the historic designations provided to Pioneer Park Cemetery in 2002.

1 / 8Commissioner Donald Payton (right) speaks as the Dallas Landmark Commission debates before voting to remove the Confederate War Memorial in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 2 / 8People watch from their seats as the Dallas Landmark Commission listens to public hearing before voting to remove the Confederate War Memorial in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 3 / 8Chair Katherine Seale makes comments before the Dallas Landmark Commission voted to remove the Confederate War Memorial in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. Vice Chair Mattia Flabiano is at right. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 4 / 8Allison Reaves speaks in the public hearing forum at the Dallas Landmark Commission, before they voted to remove the Confederate War Memorial that currently stands in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. Images of the memorial are displayed behind Carter. Reaves was the chair of the commission when the monument became designated. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 5 / 8Allison Reaves speaks in the public hearing forum at the Dallas Landmark Commission, before they voted to remove the Confederate War Memorial that currently stands in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. Images of the memorial are displayed behind Carter. Reaves was the chair of the commission when the monument became designated. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 6 / 8Sandra Crenshaw speaks in the public hearing forum at the Dallas Landmark Commission, before they voted to remove the Confederate War Memorial that currently stands in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. Images of the memorial are displayed behind Carter. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 7 / 8Chris Carter stands in line to speak in the public hearing forum at the Dallas Landmark Commission, before they voted to remove the Confederate War Memorial that currently stands in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. Images of the memorial are displayed behind Carter. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer) 8 / 8The Dallas Landmark Commission votes to remove the Confederate War Memorial in front of the downtown convention center on Monday, March 4, 2019 at Dallas City Hall. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Donald Payton, the only black member of the Landmark Commission, said it was beyond time for the memorial’s removal. He said Dallas will still have streets, building and schools that honor those who fought for the Confederacy.

“If they think [this memorial is] the only thing in this city that’s a memory to the Confederate dead, we’ve got more than enough,” Payton said.

In addition to saying the statues were “non-contributing,” Jennifer Scripps, the city’s director of Cultural Affairs, argued the memorial’s installation was “newer than the period of significance” for the park and that the removal of the monument would not “adversely affect the historic character of the property or the integrity of the historic overlay district.”

The commission’s hearing “marks the culmination of about 18 months worth of work,” Scripps said in her opening remarks.

But several commission members disagreed with Scripps’ assessment. They argued the historic overlay granted to the park expressly included the monument.

While the memorial had been moved to its current location in 1961, 40 years after the last burial in that cemetery, the obelisk and other statues were built in 1896, said commission member Emily Williams.

The memorial’s age “clearly put it in the period of significance,” Williams said.

1 / 6The Confederate War Memorial in downtown Dallas must go, the City Council has decided.(Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer) 2 / 6Georgeann Goldsborough of Houston looks at the Confederate War Memorial at Pioneer Park Cemetery in Dallas.(2018 File Photo / Staff ) 3 / 6Victoria Miller of Dallas reads an inscription on the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park cemetery in downtown Dallas.(2017 File Photo / Staff ) 4 / 6The Dallas school board has renamed four schools once named after Confederate generals depicted on the Confederate War Memorial in downtown Dallas. They are Robert E. Lee (top photo, far left), and (clockwise from right) Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston and William L. Cabell.(The Dallas Morning News / Staff photos) 5 / 6The Confederate War Memorial at Pioneer Park Cemetery in Dallas on March 21, 2018.(File Photo / Staff ) 6 / 6The Confederate War Memorial in Downtown Dallas.(Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer)

Robert Swann was the commission's most vocal opponent of the memorial’s removal, saying the statues were “a testament to the city’s values, however warped, over a long period of time.”

Swann attempted to propose his own solution to the problem — an amendment that would remove the four smaller statues of Lee, Davis, Jackson and Johnston from their pedestals and leave the central obelisk untouched. His amendment would then create an ad hoc commission to determine how best to place the memorial in a proper context.

But an assistant city attorney said Swann couldn’t put forth such a measure, and that the commission could only approve or reject the city’s request. A subsequent vote to outright reject the city’s request for removal failed, 6-9.

The commission’s chair, Katherine Seale, said the commission had been tasked by the City Council with a political question that went beyond its scope.

“It’s very unfortunate in my opinion, the way that this has been given us,” said Seale, who voted against the removal.

Friday night, the Landmark Commission members were sent a stack of letters concerning the monument - 300 pages' worth of missives begging them to vote against removal. Many were clearly cut from the same template with a George Orwell passage from '1984' used in recent years by those opposed to the removal of Confederate monuments: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered."

Some said their family members and ancestors were U.S. and Confederate veterans, and that it was wrong to remove tributes to soldiers of any stripe. Others, still, questioned what would stop future generations from removing the memorials to slain presidents and Vietnam veterans.

Many public speakers expressed similar views before the vote.

Only three speakers supported the city’s efforts, including two civic leaders who served on the city’s Confederate monuments task force: civil rights activist John Fullinwider and CitySquare’s Gerald Britt.

“The people of Dallas deserve a public landscape that affirms the full humanity of everyone who lives here ... not this God-forsaken monument that honors what should be condemned,” Fullinwider said.

Twenty-one speakers asked the commission to reject the city’s recommendation, including former City Council member Sandra Crenshaw, who is black, and Allison Reaves-Poggi, a former chair of the Landmark Commission.

“For the City Council, this is not an issue of history,” said Chris Carter, one of the speakers who also vociferously opposed the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Oak Lawn Park in 2017. “It is not an issue of morality. This is a bunch of young, cravenly ambitious city councilmen using these monuments as a political football to further their own political careers.”

The council’s majority, which regarded the memorial as a racist relic, last month authorized city management to spend $480,000 to remove the memorial from the cemetery, which could prove tricky.

But during a briefing Monday morning, Liz Casso, one of the city’s heritage preservation officers, said the monument landed in the southeast corner of the cemetery because that was the least populated section.

Several cemetery aficionados have maintained in recent weeks that the memorial was placed atop graves in 1961, which city officials dispute. But City Hall has, for lack of a better word, lost bodies in the cemetery before.

Twenty years ago, during construction of Ceremonial Drive in front of the convention center, 15 previously unknown or simply forgotten graves were discovered during an archaeological study of the original Odd Fellows section. The bodies were reinterred in the cemetery near where they had been discovered.

The former chair, Reaves-Poggi, said that her biggest concern in the removal was that “proper care won’t be given to the area that we worked so hard to get” protected.