An Obama Presidential Center in Chicago contractor has filed a $40 million lawsuit alleging racial discrimination, the New York Post reports.
Subcontractor Robert McGee accuses the engineering firm managing the construction of the Obama Center, Thornton Tomasetti, of racial discrimination. He says the discriminatory practice forced his firm II in One to do extra work, leaving him at risk of bankruptcy.
The Obama Center is being constructed at Jackson Park in Chicago, Illinois, at a cost of $830 million. It will host a museum, library, and community and conference facilities. The Obama Foundation, which offers scholarships via the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, will oversee its development.
It features a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, and a sledding hill.
However, it will not host any presidential records. Instead, it will display 30 million pages of digitized unclassified documents with no on-site archivists to assist researchers. Construction was expected to start in 2018 but was delayed until 2021, with its opening expected in 2026. Environmentalists also opposed the project and filed lawsuits, citing its environmental impacts, including cutting down trees and destroying bird habitat. However, the Obama Center claimed it would plant new trees, providing new bird habitats.
Meanwhile, McGee accuses Thornton Tomasetti of falsely accusing his firm of lacking sufficient qualifications and experience to perform the work, adding that “non-minority-owned contractors were sufficiently qualified.” The allegation suggests that DEI was involved in awarding the contract.
Thornton Tomasetti denies the racial discrimination allegations, citing the subcontractor’s “underperformance and inexperience.” The firm states that the “multitude of problems” caused by the alleged incompetence of the African-American-owned firm allegedly resulted in hundreds of hours spent “reviewing, analyzing, re-designing and responding to corrective work.” Additionally, Tomasetti says the subcontractor behind the $40 million lawsuit was “questionably qualified.”
However, the subcontractor says Thornton Tomasetti changed standards and imposed new rebar spacing and tolerance requirements differing from the American Concrete Institute standards. The changes resulted in “excessively rigorous and unnecessary inspection,” resulting in extensive paperwork that affected productivity, causing losses amounting to millions.
In addition, Thornton Tomasetti denies the racial discrimination allegations, stating that it and the architectural firm involved in the Obama Center’s construction “bent over backwards to assist what everyone knows was a questionably qualified subcontractor team in areas where more qualified subcontractor would not have required it.”
Obama’s policies were instrumental in establishing DEI hiring practices, including the FAA policy that turned down nearly a thousand air traffic controllers.
