PENDLETON — A technical mistake meant the Pendleton City Council had to postpone a decision on an ordinance that would prohibit further preservation of historical sidewalk stamps.

Shortly after the Jan. 6 meeting began, City Manager Robb Corbett said the draft ordinance failed to make an important distinction.

Corbett said the ordinance is meant to alter the rules around the preservation of historical monuments, but the proposal needed to distinguish between historical monuments and survey monuments, a marker set by a surveyor to mark a property or land line.

The sidewalk stamps — a series of historical etchings in the sidewalk that spell out the city’s old street names — rose to prominence after the Pendleton Historic Preservation Commission decided to reinstall or restamp a series of stamps that featured the names of four Confederate figures: Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

In November 2020, resident Joshua Walker broke the Davis stamp in half and nailed a pro-Black Lives Matter sign to it as an act of protest. He was later cited for criminal mischief, and his arraignment in Pendleton Municipal Court is slated for Feb. 24.

Mayor John Turner soon ordered city staff halt reinstallation of the stamps, saying the city had been inconsistent in preserving previous sidewalk stamps. The ordinance was an attempt to prevent future sidewalk stamp preservation, although the four stamps that were along Southeast Byers Avenue are the only known stamps that reference the Confederacy.

Briana Spencer was among a group of residents who encouraged the council to remove the stamps at a previous meeting, and she was in the audience in the Jan. 6 meeting. Mayor John Turner apologized to her, adding that staff hadn’t discovered the error until a few hours before the meeting, too late to revise the draft ahead of the vote.

The council’s next meeting is scheduled for Jan. 19.