A Chicago-based concrete subcontractor has filed a $40-million federal lawsuit against Thornton Tomasetti, which is providing structural engineering and protective design services for the Obama Presidential Center project, alleging that racial discrimination caused project delays and cost overruns and put the subcontractor on the verge of bankruptcy.
The subcontractor, II in One Concrete, is part of the Concrete Collective, a joint venture on the project that also includes W.E. O'Neill Construction Co., and Trice Construction Co.
The initial subcontract price of the II in One JV subcontract was $27 million. According to the lawsuit, the damages that II in One has suffered include lost profits from this project and inability to obtain surety credit needed to bid on bonded projects, including public projects.
II In One alleges that it was singled out due to racial discrimination and “subjected to baseless criticisms and defamatory and discriminatory accusations” by New York-based structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti.
The lawsuit alleges that Thornton Tomasetti made an “improper and unanticipated decision” to impose new rules regarding rebar spacing and tolerance requirements, and required the subcontractor to undergo “excessively rigorous and unnecessary inspection,” which resulted in “extensive paperwork that impacted productivity and resulted in millions in losses.”
“In a shocking and disheartening turn of events, the African-American owner of a local construction company finds himself and his company on the brink of forced closure because of racial discrimination by the structural engineer,” the lawsuit states.
Robert McGee, one of the owners of II In One Concrete, also alleges that Thornton Tomasetti submitted a letter to the owner, the Obama Foundation, falsely indicating that project delays and cost overruns were the result of “the underperformance and inexperience of the concrete subcontractor.”
Other accusations about the costly problems on the project also apparently came from the project's general contractor, Lakeside Alliance. It is made up of construction firms Brown & Momen, Power & Sons Construction, Safeway Construction and UJAMAA Construction and Turner Construction.
These allegations include the timeliness of Thornton Tomasetti’s responsiveness during construction administration, the quality of its structural drawings and specifications, the number of requests for information during construction, rebar congestion and splice requirements.
In a memo attached to the lawsuit, Thornton Tomasetti states that Lakeside Alliance's claims that the engineering firm "is somehow responsible for certain challenges encountered during the project's concrete construction" are "factually incorrect and wholly meritless." In the memo, the engineer states that the construction issues "were all unequivocally driven by the underperformance and inexperience of the concrete subcontractor."
New York City-based Thornton Tomasetti calls corrective work needed on the project "extensive and wide-ranging.” Some of the items the engineer says it had to review include damage to caisson dowels, removal of a mat pour due to curing heat issues, a missed keyway in tower cores, exposed rebar, failure to install bars to approved shop drawings, pouring the garage entry ramp wall at the wrong thickness and failure to set ink beam bars at the correct elevation.
“As you can see, this is an inordinate amount, and an experienced contractor would not have had this amount of problems,” the engineer's memo states.
In response to the lawsuit, Emily Bittner, vice president of communications at The Obama Foundation, disputed the claim of racial discrimination by Thornton Tomasetti.
"If the foundation believed that any vendor was acting with a racist intent, we would immediately take appropriate action. We have no reason to believe that Thornton Tomasetti acted with racist intent," she said in a statement.
