Obama Library Goose & “Bend Over DEI”?

Touted as Barack Obama’s shrine to DEI, his presidential library’s price tag not only went from a whopping $350 million to an astounding $850 million money pit & a $40 million discrimination lawsuit by minority contractor whom management said stunk.

Mind you, Obama’s original cost estimates were a record to begin with, far exceeding Bill Clinton’s record $165 million cost to build. And, the 19-acre library site on Chicago’s South Side is still  nowhere near getting done. Meanwhile, DEI repeatedly is referenced in the lawsuit & cited as an example of why the project’s costs zoomed like a Space X rocket. The short of it, according to Fox News, is that Robert McGee, the Black co-owner of ‘II in One Construction’ sued the project’s managing firm for libel & discrimination, after his concrete & rebar services firm ran up huge cost overruns because of “unwarranted changes” in the standards & specs he was provided. In turn, the NY-based company overseeing the project’s structural engineering & design, Thornton Tomasetti, had explained in an earlier memo to McGee & other minority contractors that those spec changes were triggered by faulty work, e.g., “cracked slabs & exposed rebars … The construction issues [and cost overruns] were all unequivocally driven by the underperformance & inexperience of the concrete subcontractor.” To boot, the memo says, the managers “bent over backwards” to help the plaintiff.

Well, we’ll let the folks argue the “quality of work” and “experience” claims in court. But, the Fox story reminds that a major claim in the lawsuit was that Thornton Tomasetti, instead of bending over backwards to help, “undermined the project’s diversity & inclusion goals outlined in the project’s general contract.” The key legal question perhaps, then, is “How far does a firm managing a minority firm have to ‘bend over backwards’ before getting goosed?”

Davd Soul