Obama’s Presidential Center facing environmental impact lawsuit
“My client is concerned about deals cut in secret and what those were.”
When I visited the Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan Presidential Libraries during the Christmas season of 2016, I was struck by the appropriate scale of both facilities.
The Nixon building was about the size of a metropolitan library and had his childhood home and the Marine One helicopter. Reagan’s library was far grander, as befitted a great President with an impressive legacy.
So, when I first saw the plans for the shrine-like Barack Obama Presidential LibraryYoga Center and Basketball Court, I wondered how the Chicago community would feel about the monstrosity envisioned for his fairly questionable legacy. This is especially true for Chicago, which was ill-served by Obama’s domestic policies.
As more information is being revealed about how badly Obama behaved in office (e.g., allowing Iran to obtain an American drone), more and more Americans are overcoming their reticence at criticizing the first black President. I believe that the mocking of the official portraits is merely the beginning of the end of the grand legacy that was planned.
Now, a group of Chicago community activists have filed a lawsuit demanding answers about the Barack Obama Presidential Center’s “impact on the environment” of the historic Jackson Park area.
“Like the public generally, we find the Obama Foundation and City of Chicago not forthcoming,” Gabriel Piemonte and Janet Geovanis, two members of the Coalition to Save Jackson Park, wrote Wednesday in a Hyde Park Herald letter to the editor. “This is a massive development involving public land, and we have been kept in the dark about too many details.”
The coalition, which filed the Freedom of Information Act complaint on Jan. 16, accused the “wealthy Obama Foundation and the city officials it works with” of refusing “to engage with citizens whose housing, schools, and parks will be forever altered” by the library’s construction.
The group’s FOIA request, filed Nov. 3, sought information on a host of environmental impact issues, including “potential flooding and run-off,” “avian-migration and nesting issues,” and “impact on local microclimate and temperatures in Jackson Park.”
Like so much of the history of the Obamas, the residents fear what was promised will not be the actual reality.
“My client is concerned about deals cut in secret and what those were,” said Daniel Massoglia, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the coalition. “The concern is that private interests are co-opting public land to build what is no longer accurately called a presidential library with very little community involvement.”
…Despite the Obama Foundation’s insistence that the center will have the same feel as any other presidential library, just not be operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, “it has changed and that does matter,” said Gabriel Piemonte, a Jackson Park resident and member of the coalition. “I feel that this isn’t what we talked about,” Piemonte said. “We talked about a more seriously purposed facility.” Piemonte will be content when “the community is a part of the decision-making process about the center,” he said. “The city is not sharing with us.”
I project there will be many more complaints and lawsuits unless the plans for the library begin to reflect the true nature and extent of Obama’s national legacy.
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the center will have the same feel as any other presidential library, just not be operated by the National Archives and Records Administration
Sounds like this is not intended to be a Presidential library at all. What, then? Headquarters for the new Transformed America?
That sentence jumped off the page at me, too! Even Clinton let his library be run that way.
But I am feeling a bit of optimism – I think Obama and his handlers are trying to be so clever, so secret, so “transformative”, that in the end they’re just going to create a giant mess that will collapse under its own weight.
It’s like those Official Portraits revealed yesterday – they are supposed to be oh-so avant garde, show everyone how hip and mod the Obamas are, compared to all of those other fuddy duddy white Presidents – and instead, they look flat and childish, something you’d expect to see sitting in the cafeteria during a 6th grade Art Festival.
And I think Obama succeeded in creating the perfect tribute to himself, immortalized forever – a hackneyed, amateurish, and talentless imitation of Great Men who had come before.
Bunker!
It was intended to be Obama’s last bunker…..
Maybe Hillary allowed in by special request…….
Let a thousand environmental impact lawsuits bloom against the Obama Pyramid.
BO’s official portrait might have a sperm painted onto it.. You cannot make this up,,, it is a thing with the artist.. Kihinde Wiley. I am somehow oddly not surprised. FWIW some people claim it is on his forehead, I can’t tell. Hope he is proud.
After this, nothing about his “library” would surprise me.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/27081/did-obama-portrait-artist-paint-sperm-his-face-joseph-curl
With obaaama’s gay background, those sperm might have been on there after his long meeting with the “artist”.
Those portraits appear to be somewhere in between Monty Python and George Harrison’s ‘Wonderwall’ art style.
Don’t get me going about the fingers.
They’re just Old School Stalinist/Leftist BAD ART!
They don’t break any ground – unless it’s in the price charged to the U.S. taxpayer for them……
Everything he does seems to be a purposeful affront to America.
Yes, but let us just luxuriate in his long overdue absence. Thank God for DJT!
Probably some scheme to keep all of his papers and other records out of the public eye. Based on what’s been uncovered in the past year, you just have to suspect there is a shit-ton of illegality documented in those records.
HQ and center of “The Resistance”.
Doesn’t the design remind you of some of Michael Ramirez’s “Easter Island” cartoons?
Future civilizations will look at this monstrosity and assume the populace was not very civilized or advanced.
Or that very incompetent visitors from space foisted this on the earthlings. 🙂
Now, a group of Chicago community activists have filed a lawsuit demanding answers about the Barack Obama Presidential Center’s “impact on the environment” of the historic Jackson Park area.
Don’t worry, Chicago. If you like your
doctorpark, you can keep yourdoctorpark!I am stealing this line!
No, ‘stealing’ doesn’t sound good. I’ll let you borrow it.
Just have it back before dark. 😉
if this ‘library’ is funded by and uses public land then it needs to be administered by the Parks service – if not let the 0bama ‘library’ be subject to any other PRIVATE bldg.
I LOL when reading the complaints and environmental impact study demands – just too delicious, i will smile all day thinking about – sauce for the goose or is it turkey ?
for 0bama the MB indoctrinated ‘POTUS’ turkey is the correct answer.
The really funny thing about it is that he might be cooling his jets in the joint by the time his ‘library’ become fully functional!
The best part is that this is being generated by Community Activists.
can
t wait for the rayyyy cisss card to be played.
“if he waz white yow wooden komplayn” doan cha know.
That’s the beauty of these complaints – they’re being lodged by black activist groups in Chicago.
The group’s FOIA request, filed Nov. 3, sought information on a host of environmental impact issues, including “potential flooding and run-off,” “avian-migration and nesting issues,” and “impact on local microclimate and temperatures in Jackson Park.”
The first, yes, because any construction that doesn’t take that into consideration is trash. The second two should be tossed without comment. Really, if we have a presidential library big enough to affect bird migrations…
Are birds currently using the park for nesting and/or resting on migration flights spring and fall? If so, then taking any significant portion of the oark for the “library” would be interfering with bird nesting and migration.
Any Endangered Species on the park land?
Well, it does seem to be the future nesting spot for the Greater Left-Winged Loon…
Jackson Park is huge…almost 170 acres. It is a big stop on migratory flyways and, yes is a nesting spot for the Piping Plover, which at one point in the 1980s was down to 12 breeding pairs. The bigger issue is that Jackson Park is natural (not landfill like some other Chicago areas along Lake Michigan) and drainage is a tremendous issue because the water table is right there.
“unless the plans for the library begin to reflect the true nature and extent of Obama’s national legacy”
Namely, that would be a housing project managed by Thurgood Orenthal Stubbs. But without the humor of The PJ.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1X02PY1_JQ
How soon will it look like Chicago? Boarded up and broken windows with homeless people cooking food over a trash barrel.
From the looks, of it, that was their inspiration.
Maybe they used Valerie Jarrett’s slum building that she refused to repair the heaters in the middle of a Chicago winter. I think that is what was covered at the time…….
Y’know, that ugly building has the look of a defensive citadel. I almost expected to see arrow slits.
I was thinking it looked like a place to hold death row inmates.
And defecating on the sidewalk.
Perhaps this is only one more attempt of Obama to mock American values and American exceptionalism. Just let him build it then burn it to the ground, problem solved…and we know the people in Chicago know how to burn things to the ground. Maybe Obama can have his very own private riot.
For the library to match Obama’s legacy it would need to be a house for a mouse, made of matches and tinder, set ablaze on opening day.
Albert Speer, call your office…
If I was Chicago I would wait at least a year because the way the Russiagate meme is going he may well be in jail! Then they could rename the prison library after him. Or at least the funny paper section.
Gee, what goes around, comes around. Who knew?
Should there be some sort of moratorium on building presidential libraries until they’re out of office for 10 to 25 years or so? History doesn’t always judge someone the same way as their academia and media cheerleaders currently do.
Celebrity shrine escapes Hollywood; news at 9:00.
Looks like an abandoned 17th Century coastal fortification.
Or a statue of a discarded, overturned, Chinese food take-out container.
I particularly like the fact that the Obama “Library” will contain no books or research materials. LOL!! So appropriate. Decades worth of jokes right there.
How soon before we can say “You did not build that”?