Unpaid contractor bills tied to the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s lakefront are stacking up, following its high-profile grand opening. Fox News reporting identified the largest outstanding dispute as involving the Concrete Collective, which is seeking more than forty million dollars in additional payment, alongside smaller subcontractors including structural steel firm Area Erectors, owed roughly $620,000, and minority-owned excavation and concrete subcontractor CSI3000, owed approximately $236,000.
Proft welcomed back Michael Owen, president of Adamson Plumbing Contractors, who previously discussed being owed roughly four million dollars for completed work on the project. Owen confirmed his company has now ceased operations, laying off 25 union employees, after concluding the financial situation had become untenable despite holding a $1.7 million mechanic’s lien against the project. Owen said the decision to shut down, rather than continue absorbing losses, was the most responsible option available to protect the company’s ability to eventually pay its own vendors and employees.
Owen said he has received no direct communication from senior leadership associated with the Obama Foundation regarding the unpaid bills, describing a brief exchange with representatives of Turner Construction’s Lakeside Alliance that he ultimately had to refer to his legal team. He characterized the overall response from project leadership as purely transactional, without acknowledgment of the financial hardship caused to contractors. Owen said he believes additional subcontractors are likely to come forward publicly given the scale of the project and the number of entities involved, including the University of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, and the City of Chicago.
Owen, who operates a union shop affiliated with Plumbers Local 130, said the union is understandably unhappy with the situation and that he intends to resolve outstanding obligations with the union directly. He expressed particular frustration with what he described as political hypocrisy from Illinois’s Democratic leadership, arguing that officials who routinely campaign on economic populism and criticize wealthy interests have remained silent on the unpaid contractor issue despite regularly seeking union support during election cycles. Owen also referenced ABC7 reporting suggesting that Turner Construction’s Lakeside Alliance remains satisfied with the project, which he said effectively confirmed that at least one major entity involved has been paid while smaller subcontractors have not.
Owen and Proft also discussed the broader state of Chicago’s construction industry, with Owen noting a dramatic decline in active tower cranes across the city’s skyline, from roughly 52 in 2017 to approximately 13 or 14 currently, a trend he attributed to developers increasingly favoring less heavily regulated markets in the southeastern United States. Owen, who is Hispanic American, also expressed frustration that minority-owned subcontractors on the project, including Black-owned firms he said have gone bankrupt due to nonpayment, have received little public advocacy, and said he felt a responsibility to speak publicly on their behalf given that he was not bound by a nondisclosure agreement. Owen closed by noting that none of the current candidates seeking Chicago’s mayoral office in the upcoming election have reached out to him regarding the dispute, despite some already securing support from figures connected to the Obama Foundation.