The star-studded grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center this week featured Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, and other celebrities, but none addressed the unpaid contractors and subcontractors who built the facility.
Michael Owen, president of Adamson Plumbing Contractors, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to detail his company’s experience on the project, which he says has left Adamson nearly four million dollars in the red due to project delays, mechanical engineering disputes, and more than one hundred unpaid change order requests.
Owen said he joined Adamson as a junior partner in June 2023, by which point the project should already have been rounding toward completion based on the original timeline. Instead it has now run more than three years past what his predecessors and industry peers anticipated. He said he has worked on large Chicago construction projects throughout his career, including Soldier Field in 2003 and the Wrigley Field renovation, and the Obama Center was a fundamentally different animal. He described walking onto the site and feeling like he was at a rock concert given the sheer volume of personnel, many of whom even his peers in the trades could not identify, alongside interns photographing everything with iPads. He attributed much of the dysfunction to what he called too many cooks in the kitchen, including an East Coast ownership consortium, the architectural firm, and a mechanical engineering firm whose decisions he said directly caused significant financial harm to his company.
Owen said Adamson was actually performing reasonably well on the project financially until the fourth quarter of 2024, when a dispute arose with the mechanical engineer over what Owen characterized as a decision to ignore both the City of Chicago plumbing code and Adamson’s expertise as the trade specialist on site. He said ownership ultimately forced Adamson to redo completed work at a cost of nearly $900,000, a cost increase layered on top of broader project delays including repeated instances where Adamson’s crews mobilized equipment and personnel for scheduled work only to arrive and find the work area closed without explanation.
On the response from the general contractor, Turner Construction, and the Lakeside Alliance overseeing the project, Owen said the answer has been consistent stonewalling. He said he believes his nearly four million dollar shortfall actually places him toward the lower end of subcontractors affected, noting that one of his larger industry peers on the project is in the red by tens of millions of dollars. He said colleagues who have been involved with the project since its earliest phases are reluctant to speak out publicly given their deeper financial entanglement and exposure. He described a recurring phrase used by project management when contractors raised concerns about cost overruns: price and proceed, which he said functioned as a verbal assurance that payment would eventually follow even as the actual payment never materialized.
Owen confirmed that, to his knowledge through industry conversations and legal counsel, at least two Black-owned subcontracting businesses involved in the project have already filed for bankruptcy, with more likely to follow. He said his own company has resorted to leverage tactics including withholding additional labor from the site, and described a recent instance where Lakeside Alliance requested two journeymen plumbers for housekeeping work ahead of the grand opening, offering to pay for that labor separately and release some of Adamson’s withheld retention funds as an incentive. Adamson agreed two weeks before the interview in the interest of professionalism, but as of the interview, the promised payment still had not arrived.
Owen confirmed that litigation against the project’s principals is forthcoming, noting that his legal team includes industry veterans with decades of relevant experience and that Adamson is far from alone in preparing legal action. He emphasized that Adamson is an established union contractor, staffed through Chicago’s Local 130, with a portfolio that includes the Zachary Hotel, Walter Payton College Prep, the Legacy Tower, and Millennium Park, and noted pointedly that nobody associated with the Obama Center project has alleged that the unpaid work was deficient in quality. The silence from the project’s celebrity-studded public face, he suggested, speaks for itself.