Former Walt Disney designer Bob Rogers offered an unusually brief response last spring when explaining how a live actor portraying a fictional Civil War soldier vanished into thin air at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
“It’s magic,” the typically verbose Rogers said.
Now, Illinois officials are reviewing whether they should contest as much as $15 million because of cost overruns and delays stemming from Rogers’ “magic,” as well as the work of other major contractors at the sprawling complex that includes the museum, library, parking garage, visitors center and park in downtown Springfield. The administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich has hired a Chicago law firm and claims analyst to review project expenses to determine if money can be recovered for taxpayers.
The administration must strike a balance between taking a hard look at the contractors who worked on the complex and promoting a museum that has become a popular tourist attraction this summer–drawing nearly 300,000 visitors since opening in April–and has fueled a surge in Springfield’s economy. The target date for finishing the analysis is Sept. 13.
The Lincoln project spanned three governors, cost millions more than anticipated, experienced delays from quarrels among contractors and design problems and took longer to conceptualize and build than it took Lincoln to lead the country through the Civil War.
Along the way, officials spared little expense: Contractors imported cabinets from Germany and limestone quarried in Egypt and finished in Italy. They made molds of trees from southern Illinois and placed the replicas next to a cabin loosely resembling Lincoln’s Indiana boyhood home. They re-created finely tailored dresses, costing $8,000 apiece, based on pictures of Washington socialites who were rivals of Mary Todd Lincoln.
The project’s budget and scope changed constantly. What began in the Jim Edgar administration as a modest $6 million to $10 million center to house and display Lincoln artifacts mushroomed over the years into a high-tech national tourist attraction. It increased in cost to nearly $150 million as officials acquired federal dollars, and state legislators and various gubernatorial administrations opened state coffers for it.
The project proved to be worth big money to construction firms, lobbyists, lawyers and Rogers, the Los Angeles-area designer whose firm raked in $56.7 million from the project–nearly $10 million more than the state had originally agreed to pay his firm.
Officials say the state has paid more than $101 million and the federal government contributed $32.3 million, while the city of Springfield has kicked in $8.64million. An $11.5 million visitors center remains to be completed.
“I referred to it as a project that never heard the word `no,'” said Maynard Crossland, former director of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. “Whatever [the project] has needed, it’s gotten. And so it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches, almost.”
Building woes
Even with an abundance of funds, in the final months, the project was beset with construction problems.
Though a temporary exhibit space had been part of plans for the museum for years, officials determined the climate controls needed a $1 million upgrade to ensure sensitive historical items, such as the Lincoln deathbed, could be presented in the future.
Just weeks before the opening, an air pressure test blew a hole in the roof of the room carefully constructed to protect the state’s precious copy of the Gettysburg Address. Fortunately, the test was completed before the rare document, handwritten by Lincoln, was put on display.
The state examination by the law firm of Bell, Boyd & Lloyd and URS, a claims analyst, is focused on Rogers’ firm, BRC Imagination Arts of Burbank, Calif.; Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum Inc., the St. Louis architect; and Siciliano Inc., the Springfield general contractor.
Though the project was well under way when Blagojevich took office in 2003, the new administration quickly discovered that contractor disputes threatened to halt construction.
“We had a choice: shut the project down or negotiate a way to get it done and open it to the public,” said Jan Grimes, acting executive director of the Capital Development Board, the state’s construction management arm. “So in the fall of 2003, in the interests of the Springfield community and of the state, CDB negotiated a settlement. We paid additional money to get the project completed and prevent greater losses, but we reserved the state’s rights.”
But last year, with the project still uncompleted, Rogers asked that another $7.9 million be added to his contract, which had expired in early 2002, saying he faced rising costs to keep his project team together and to warehouse exhibits as he waited for the museum building to be finished.
Rogers estimated wages for his project manager, creative director, senior designers and others at $1,400 a day, according to a prior agreement with the state. He placed his own executive producer salary at $3,600 a day.
Even though officials point to Rogers’ tangles with architects as one of the major delays, Rogers blamed architectural revisions and flaws with the design of the library’s heating and cooling system.
“There were extensions, and it caused us a lot of extra work and tremendous amount of extra headaches,” he said. “Eventually, it got to be ridiculous.”
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Hitting a wall
By early 2000 the conflict between architects and Rogers’ firm had idled subcontractors for weeks, according to several people involved in the project.
“It was difficult,” said Rick Lawrence, Siciliano’s president. “We were trying to build a facility to accommodate an installation of exhibits, [and] we didn’t have a good grasp on what they were or where they went or how they went in. … There was no team spirit or team cooperation to get it done. Everybody was worrying about the politics of it and what was being said about it.”
Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum officials have declined to comment.
Seeking financial relief, Rogers turned to the influential lobbying firm of Freeborn & Peters, as well as Bruce Bonczyk, a former lawyer for the Capital Development Board. Rogers budgeted $344,863 for Freeborn & Peters and another $10,617 to Bonczyk to aid in his company’s dealings with the state, according to internal company documents obtained by the Tribune.
That created this odd situation: Rogers used project money, which came from taxpayers, to hire a politically connected lobbyist to negotiate with the state into giving him additional taxpayer money. It worked. The Capital Development Board voted 4-1 last fall to award Rogers $4.4 million.
“We didn’t think we would need that high-power of an attorney, but when we got into the middle of this, we said, `Oh boy,'” Rogers said, calling the settlement mutually agreeable. “We made it work, and it turned out great.”
For their part, the architect and general contractor both seek more than $1 million from the state because the cost of delays exceeded initial contract amounts, according to state documents.
Over the years, Siciliano has blamed delays on reasons ranging from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks slowing down shipment of the Italian stonework to extra activities required for the museum ceremonial bash in 2002 thrown by Gov. George Ryan, according to state records.
In fact, tests conducted on the same night of Ryan’s nationally televised ceremony for the unfinished library led to one of the biggest delays of all. Building engineers with the state historic preservation agency found the temperature and humidity did not register proper levels in the library, officials said.
After workers dealt with the humidity, they discovered that condensation on the windows persisted, a frightening prospect for a new library charged with housing Illinois’ most cherished artifacts.
They determined vapor barriers, needed to insulate the frames around windows during the extreme cold and heat of central Illinois’ weather, were either improperly designed, in some cases, or improperly installed in others, officials said. Wooden panels on the library’s inside walls had to be dried out.
The library’s official opening was in October 2004–nearly two years after the $280,000 Ryan gala.
Visual stimulation
An early proposal in the 1990s called for a Lincoln Heritage Center priced at $6.5 million to $10.9 million. But the price rose after trips to several presidential libraries by a group of state officials that included Susan Mogerman and Julie Cellini, chairwoman of the historic preservation agency’s board of directors and wife of Springfield Republican powerbroker William Cellini. Those visits left Lincoln planners uninspired and officials agreed that the Lincoln project called for a more Disney-like–and more costly–approach.
Rather than simply putting Lincoln treasures in glass cases, Illinois had a chance to create a “personal encounter with Lincoln,” said Julie Cellini, who spearheaded the project.
Gov. Jim Edgar secured $10million in his last budget. Only weeks before leaving office in January 1999, Edgar selected Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum architects and BRC, Rogers’ firm, and acknowledged the eventual cost could hit $100 million. Shortly thereafter, Ryan tapped into his Illinois FIRST public-works program to throw in $50 million, and federal funds began picking up.
Illinois officials hooked up with Rogers, described by Newsweek as the “theme-park industry’s resident futurist,” after meeting in Los Angeles with Disney Co. representatives. Disney, where Rogers once worked, advised the Illinois group that attracting a wide audience would require something more visually stimulating than glass exhibit cases.
Rogers won them over immediately.
“I think from the first time we heard him talk that we knew he was the right guy,” said Mogerman, who headed the preservation agency when Rogers was chosen.
In competing against several noted firms for an early piece of the project, Rogers spoke passionately about how a London museum leads patrons to a simple exhibit displaying the bullet that killed Admiral Lord Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar, in which the British crushed Napoleon in 1805.
“It was very dramatic, and at the end of it, we were practically applauding him [with], `This is what we need,'” recalled Mogerman, now the chief operating officer of a foundation supporting the museum. “It was perfect. It was just absolutely perfect.”
Despite heavy competition early on, BRC was the only firm to respond when the Ryan administration requested bidders for the final and most lucrative portion of the contract. The specifications largely reflected Rogers’ concept of a “full Lincoln experience” with holographic images, theater settings, faux Lincolns and examples of specific scenes from the president’s life. The state accepted.
Delays and overruns aside, Rogers notes the museum has been a huge success.
“If you are really going to dare to do something world class, something over the top, something like you have never done before, there are going to be a few bumps in the road,” Rogers said. “Yeah, maybe it didn’t go as perfect as possible, but take a look at what you got and what you spent. This is an incredible value.
“In the end, they really got their money’s worth.”
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