Obama's Library Just Opened, But Some of the Black Contractors Have Said They're Owed Serious Money
As former President Barack Obama’s monument to himself opened in Chicago, contractors said the project was a monumental disaster because they never got paid.
African American Contractors Association president Omar Shareef said multiple people are angry over not being paid sums that reach seven figures, according to the Daily Mail.
Shareef said “it’s to the point that they wished they had never done” the project.
What’s worse, fear of retribution for speaking out against the project is keeping some quiet.
“They are scared to death about talking about it,” Shareef told Fox News.
“I’ve never seen this happen since I’ve been in business,” Shareef added. “The building does look nice, but the fact doesn’t matter that they’re not paying our damn contractors.”
Shareef said the project broke its lofty social aspirations.
“The promise was that this project was going to uplift minority contractors and uplift the community,” Shareef said. “What sense is celebrating Juneteenth if our black contractors are not getting their money?”
“Some of the people have put their mortgages up, they’re going to lose their bonding… they are going to lose their relationship with their supplier as well as their banker,” he said.
“That’s a bad signal to put out the fact that seven to eight to maybe 10 of our contractors in our community are going to be eliminated from doing business because of the debt that they incurred on this particular project,” he said. “If they would have known it was a Trojan horse or a Pandora’s box, I don’t know if they would have raced as much as they did to be a part of it.”
Adamson Plumbing owner Mike Owen, who is not a minority contractor, said that in the course of the project, more than 100 change orders forced him to do work other than what was planned, leaving him $4 million in the red.
“That is a hole that no subcontractor, small business can survive,” Owen said.
“I haven’t had eight hours or six hours sleep in over a year,” Owen said. “I’m cooked emotionally. I feel like an aluminum can that’s been thrown in front of a steamroller. We’re crushed. And I have to fight for my company and for my people.”
“It was kind of hard seeing some local and national celebrities high-fiving and back-slapping here about the work that’s been done,” Owen said.
Owen noted that he went public because he had no other option.
“As for me and my company, I’m at the end of my rope and I see no other choice than to have to tell my story,” Owen said. “This is not to embarrass anybody, but this is just to make sure that the truth gets told out here of what has happened to the companies that poured their heart and soul into getting this job complete and operational.”
Illinois Republican Party Chair Robert Grogan said he’s worried taxpayers could end up paying the bills.
“One of their core promises was they were supposed to create an endowment as basically an insurance policy so the taxpayers wouldn’t get stuck with the bill,” he said, according to Fox News.
“They promised hundreds of millions of dollars for it. It’s still sitting at the $1 million mark [where it stood] when they opened it up. So I don’t believe that they’ve kept that promise. The fact that they have created this probably unsustainable edifice to an ego and then, eventually, if it goes under, who’s going to be caught with the bill time and time again? It’s the taxpayers of the city, citizens of Chicago and the state of Illinois,” he added.
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