SECRET BIDS BROUGHT TO LIGHT
Under pressure from lawsuit, Obama Foundation makes other prez center plans public
WASHINGTON — Under pressure from a federal lawsuit, the Obama Foundation released on Friday the secret bids for the Obama Presidential Center, from the University of Chicago and three other schools.
The bids were made public in the wake of the Obama Foundation and the U. of C. being subpoenaed Sept. 28 for the documents in the pending court case, which seeks to prevent construction of the center in Jackson Park.
A hearing is set for Wednesday in Chicago before U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey.
The U. of C. pitch for the Obama Center beat bids from Columbia, the University of Hawaii and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The U. of C. documents released include a first-round bid filed in June 2014 and the final proposal, submitted that December.
Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle picked Jackson Park for their center in July 2016, a controversial location because it involved landmarked public park land.
The U. of C. bid included a proposal for a sweeping redo of historic Jackson Park, far beyond the acres needed for the Obama Center campus, in order to improve the connecting green space for other nearby museums, known as the “Museum Campus South.”
That included combining the golf courses at South Shore and Jackson and closing Cornell Drive and other streets in the park.
“The OPL will be the anchor of a new master plan that revitalizes Jackson Park, assists with the development of the urban periphery of the park, and helps spur the development of the 63rd Street corridor,” a bid document said.
The “L” means “library.” When the bids were filed, the main components of the Obama Center were a museum and an official federal presidential library run by the National Archives and Records Administration. However, Obama decided in 2016 not to have a presidential library at his center, avoiding extensive design and financial requirements.
When the golf course proposal surfaced, foundation executives and spokesmen at the time denied knowing about the project, especially as it was becoming controversial.
The U. of C. hired a golf course designer as a consultant and said in the bid: “In conjunction with the development of the Obama Presidential Library in Woodlawn, there is the opportunity to renovate and extend the Jackson Park course and even combine it with the 9-hole course at South Shore to create a tournament-grade, 27-hole facility.”
Redacted from the bid, at the request of the U. of C., according to a foundation spokesman, is the capital commitment from trustees of the university.
The university hired three star architects to offer concepts for the three sites in the original bid: Charles Renfro, Jackson Park; David Adjaye, Washington Park; and Jeanne Gang, the South Shore Cultural Center.
Whether the Obama Center should have been granted permission to use the Chicago Park District land is among the issues in a federal lawsuit filed last May by Protect Our Parks, Inc. and three parks activists.
The closely guarded bids of the four finalists were made public by the foundation just ahead of releasing the information to the plaintiffs.
Herb Caplan, president of Protect Our Parks, said in an email that the release of the documents “will lead to additional evidence that the entire Obama Center planning has been ill conceived and in arrogant disregard of the controlling Illinois law which bars such construction in Jackson Park.”
The Chicago City Council will vote in the coming weeks on the deal to let the Obama Foundation control 19.3 acres in Jackson Park for 99 years with a payment of $10.
The Obama Center project is also the subject of an ongoing federal review, triggered because Jackson Park, designed by famed landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Erin J. Adams, Co-Founder, Southside Neighbors for Hope — an organization supporting the Jackson Park location — said in a statement: “The release of these bids should serve to remind us how competitive the process was for attracting the center to a given location. Let’s just pause for a second to imagine that the center went to Hawaii, or Columbia in New York City. Where would we be now?”
Brenda Nelms, a co-founder of Jackson Park Watch, a critic of locating the center in Jackson Park, said in a statement: “The revelation that the University of Chicago’s particular interests have driven the plans for the OPC (as well as for the proposed golf course merger) is ample cause for the City Council to delay consideration of the new ordinance scheduled for a vote on Oct. 31 so that the OPC proposal can be fully reviewed with community input.”