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Taxpayers will be paying for "Obama's gift" to Chicago for an eternity
In the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as "ObamaCare," then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi notoriously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
Let's move up 16 years to the fog of excitement, for some people that is, surrounding last month’s opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center museum in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side.
That fog of excitement, for starters, shields that the Obama museum was a devious bait-and-switch. And possibly an expensive one for Chicago.
In 2015, the Chicago City Council voted 47-0 to approve the transfer of 19 acres of Chicago Park District land to the Obama Foundation. “A deal to bring the Obama Presidential Library to the south side of Chicago is all but done,” Paris Schutz, then with WTTW, wrote at the time.
Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times called having a presidential library in Jackson Park “a selling point” in getting the Obama project approved.
In 2017, Obama left the White House -- as did his presidential records -- not all of which, despite the claims of the Obama crowd, are digital. The records ended up in a former Plunkett Furniture showroom in Hoffman Estates. This was not a small endeavor by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which runs the presidential library system -- over 20 trucks were used for the project. The data and other items were shipped to the former home of dozens of Presidents’ Day sales in anticipation of their being archived at the Obama Presidential Library 40 miles away.
But a few months later, after the bait was devoured, the switch occurred. The Obama Foundation announced that the Jackson Park complex would not be a presidential library. The City Council later approved the change in plans. And those presidential records were later shipped to Maryland.
No big endowment requirement
The primary reason for that switch seems to be, despite the Obama camp’s repeated allusions that in the digital age presidential libraries with physical records are an anachronism, is the federal endowment requirement for presidential libraries, which is sixty-percent recent of the facility’s building cost, one that a former president’s foundation is expected to finance. The cost to build the Obama Museum was $850 million. Which means a federal endowment requirement for an Obama library would have been steep, about $510 million.
The Obama Foundation in 2020 envisioned a $470 endowment for the museum; Fox News reported last month that the center's reserve fund sits at a paltry $1 million.
That's a big problem, even in the short term for Obamaworld, because many construction contractors claim that they have not been paid for their work, as Walter Todd Huston outlined for the Contrarian in June.
The federal endowment requirements are quite reasonable, because over the decades presidential libraries have morphed from humble projects, such as the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in Iowa, which looks like a suburban nursing home, to far grander venues such as the Reagan Library in California, which houses a former Air Force One jet, a onetime Marine One helicopter, and a working pub shipped from the home village of one of the Gipper’s Irish ancestors.
Earlier this month Jordan Powell, also for the Contrarian, gave a rundown of the presidential library and museum "arms race."
Taxpayers should not be left holding the bag for what are increasingly expensive vanity projects for presidential-sized egos.
What happens when Obama is gone?
In thirty years, forty years for sure, if you look at their lives from a cold actuarial perspective, Barack and Michelle Obama will have passed away. As will have the fund-raising muscle of the Obama Foundation.
So, in 2060, if the New Hampshire granite sheets begin falling off of the 225-feet high museum complex and its sewer lines are corroded -- with the Obama Center endowment still nearly empty, who pays for the repairs?
The NARA will correctly point out, “It’s not our presidential center.”
Some people are already calling the brutalist-style museum an eyesore. If it is crumbling in four decades, Chicago and Illinois taxpayers will likely be forced to pay for building rehabilitation for what everyone by then will probably agree is an ugly blemish on the lakefront. Yes, a mistake on the lake.
Chicagoans may be asking, “What’s the big deal? You are talking about expenses that might come due decades in the future.”
It is that mentality that created the unfunded pension disasters in Chicago and Illinois
Already, for what Barack Obama called a “gift” to Chicago, taxpayers are on the hook for an estimated $200 million in infrastructure projects to accommodate his museum on former park land. And that makes the Obama Center a $1 billion project.
The Obama Foundation is forecasting an astounding 600,000 paid annual visitors — that’s over 1,600 people per day -- and it is claiming tourists will plan their vacations around a trip to the Obama Museum and rent pricy downtown hotel rooms. Aside from some history geeks, few people will do so. Instead, the museum will be attended by people who live here, or tourists and business travelers who are already planning a visit to Chicago. The result could mean that other museums, such as the Art Institute, might end up with fewer guests. The Chicago tourism soup will likely be watered down by Obama’s “gift.”
Besides, how many times will someone want to pay admission to see the Obama museum? Unlike the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, it doesn’t seem to be well-positioned to be a multiple visit destination. Special exhibits will entice some guests to return, but eventually the creative well will run dry, as was the case with the Hoover Library and Museum in 2008 when its holiday attraction was “A Very Elvis Christmas.”
The glitzy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, which is in a larger metropolitan area and one that is also a major international tourist destination, has only about 250,000 annual visitors.
A white elephant?
Though the tale of the King of Siam deliberately bankrupting his enemies with sacred, ruinously expensive white elephants is almost certainly apocryphal, Barack Obama’s gift to Chicago may yet give the old story an uncomfortable ring of truth.
If Chicago had an aggressive media, this is a story it would be pursuing.
Most of the Chicago City Council, which has no Republican members, is high on what John Kass calls “Hopium.” But in the interest of taxpayers, it should be looking beyond its Obama devotion and compel the Obama Foundation to drastically beef up its endowment.
Perhaps the City Council can invite Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett, whose annual salary is $740,000, over to City Hall to talk about it. Maybe they can convince her to visit wealthy hot spots of Obama devotion, such as the Hamptons, Cape Cod, and Marin County, and bring a collection plate so those unpaid contractors can receive what they are owed.
Yes, we can have a $470 million endowment?
Just think, if the Obama Foundation built a NARA-sanctioned presidential library in Jackson Park, as they initially said they would, instead of a brutalist self-love temple, Chicago and Illinois wouldn’t be facing this potential financial sinkhole.
