The Obama Foundation promised Chicago a $470 million endowment so taxpayers would never get stuck with the bill for his presidential center.
They deposited $1 million.
That’s 0.21 percent. My students get partial credit for showing their work. This is not partial credit.
Here’s the rest of the report card. The center was pitched as a privately funded gift. Chicago’s transportation department has spent $123.3 million in public money rebuilding the roads around it. The land, 19.3 acres of Jackson Park, went for ten dollars on a 99-year lease. Final price of the building: $909 million, up from an early estimate around $300 million. Watching them manage that budget was like watching a man try to pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.
Meanwhile, a union plumbing contractor on the job says he’s nearly $4 million in the hole, laid off 25 workers, and filed a $1.72 million lien. The CEO, Valerie Jarrett, was paid $740,000 a year. And this week, 68 workers signed a letter announcing a union against the foundation. The man who promised in 2007 to walk picket lines in “a comfortable pair of shoes” now has one forming in his own lobby.
The foundation says the city deal never set a dollar figure for the endowment. Correct. The $470 million only appeared in their own 2020 annual report. Slight oversight!
They say “significant investments” are coming. I trust that line about as much as gas station sushi.
I wrote up the whole thing, including what the viral clip about it got WRONG. No, you don’t need photo ID to walk in, and the Richmond school reopened. Full article in the reply.
But what do I know, I’m only a teacher who reads the tax filings before the press release.
So, Obama fans: if a Republican president’s foundation put $1 million into a $470 million taxpayer safety net, what would you be calling it right now?
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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