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Chicago contractor’s business shutters amid legal battle with Obama Center debacle

July 24, 2026 | | Print Article

An unpaid subcontractor who worked on the Obama Presidential Center has shuttered his company to avoid bankruptcy.

Chicago businessman Mike Owen, the owner of Adamson Plumbing Contractors, told Fox News that fallout from the center’s nonpayment forced him to abandon other construction jobs and left his company on the brink of collapse.

“Laying off close to 30 people is something that no owner in our industry wants to do,” Owen said. “It’s a hard thing to do, especially when you know you can finish them and the company can still make money. But we were put in a pretty bad corner.”

Owen first went viral last month when he began speaking out publicly about how his company was “crushed” by taking on the Obama Presidential Center project:

Before the center had even opened, Owen’s company had already accrued $3.9 million in losses linked to delays, rework, labor overruns, and constantly changing project demands.

According to Fox News, he spent months negotiating with Lakeside Alliance. The Obama Foundation confirmed to FactCheck.org that Lakeside is the construction project manager that has the “primary responsibility” to “hire and manage all the subcontractors for the project.”

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Owen told Fox News that his breaking point came right when the center opened, and his company and Lakeside Alliance agreed that he’d provide two journeyman plumbers to perform some last-minute “housekeeping” at a premium nighttime rate.

After the work was performed, Lakeside told Owen that a $100,000 payment would be released through his company’s payment application. There was just one problem. The payment didn’t arrive on time, forcing him to shut down operations.

“We negotiated it in good faith,” Owen said. “Against my better judgment, I agreed [to do the work]. Not getting that large sum of money just kind of pulled the brakes on the train. It was just the final death blow to the company.”

“Rather than try to stretch it out and go bankrupt, I just decided the responsible thing was to shut it down. We’ll regroup, and we’ll see where we’re at come September,” he added.

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The only good news is that the money eventually arrived, albeit two whole weeks after he’d already suspended operations. But it was already too late.

“It’s almost like too little, too late,” he said. “It probably would have just prolonged the inevitable at this point. We’re still deep in the hole of what they owe us.”

Ever since the company was shuttered, Adamson has moved out of its original headquarters, and Owen is now working from home. Meanwhile, his company has fought back by filing a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the Obama Presidential Center.

Fox News notes, however, that the lien is smaller than the $3.9 million that Owen has alleged his company lost because of the center. In defending the $3.9 million amount, Owen said he wanted to target what Fox News describes as the “most readily documented” costs, “including unpaid fees, logged change orders and labor overruns supported by company records.”

“It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to pursue the $3.9 million in change that we lost overall,” he explained. “I’m still working with my legal team on that $3.9 million figure because I feel that it’s only right that we still hold ownership at the presidential center accountable.”

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“I’m not a litigious person, but at the same time, our legal system is there to protect the small guy. I’m just going to have to fight this out legally from here on out, and these aren’t cheap costs,” he added.

Vivek Saxena
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