A vacationing President Barack Obama will be showing his face in Honolulu today for the first time since rejecting his childhood home as the location for his presidential library.
But, of course, it wasn’t total repudiation.
While Chicago scored the big prize, Honolulu did walk away with a participation trophy in the form of an official tie-in — though no one is quite sure what that looks like seven months after the announcement.
For now the nonprofit foundation guiding the development of the Barack Obama Presidential Center is focusing on the future presidential library and museum in Chicago, the president’s home for a couple of decades before he moved into the White House.
The Barack Obama Foundation is occupied with selecting an architect for the project, which will be hosted by the University of Chicago. It could cost more than $500 million.
Meanwhile, plans for the Hawaii wing are on hold.
Honolulu’s Maya Soetoro-Ng, the president’s sister and a member of the foundation’s board of directors, said in an email Friday that “the Hawaii team continues to be in regular communication with the foundation” and that “we continue to be excited about the cooperation and shared programming that will surely take place with Hawaii in the future.”
Some have speculated that the Honolulu project might include some office space and a few employees working on an initiative or two on a topic close to the president and the first lady.
“What it looks like remains to be seen,” University of Hawaii spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said. “We’re literally years down the road.”
A committee that was expected to help develop the project has yet to be formed, and Meisenzahl said he is unaware of any plans to discuss the effort with Obama or his party during the first family’s annual winter holiday on Oahu.
Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961 and spent most of his childhood years here, having graduated from Punahou School in 1979. This is the president’s seventh trip to Hawaii in as many years of his presidency.
It was just about a year ago that Hawaii formally submitted a proposal for the Obama library, complete with a set of splashy conceptual renderings showing a sleek and modern interactive museum and visitor center.
In the planning stages for more than five years and guided by a citizens committee, the proposal included a convening institute where leaders could discuss global problems; a leadership academy focusing on issues related to schoolchildren; and a UH center for community organizing designed to appeal to Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago.
Eight acres of Hawaii Community Development Authority land, estimated to be worth $75 million, was set aside near the ocean in Kakaako.
The state spent more than $500,000 pursuing the presidential center which, if it had been selected to be built here in its entirety, would have generated between $300 million and $600 million in new economic activity and created up to 2,000 new jobs in the development phase alone, according to estimates.
Consultants figured the complex would generate between $25 million and $40 million in state and city tax revenue and more than $2 billion in new economic activity in its first decade. They predicted it would become one of Honolulu’s top five cultural attractions.
As selection day approached, however, most Hawaii officials acknowledged it was unlikely Honolulu would win the entire presidential center. But to earn a part of it, they said, submitting a proposal for the entire complex was required.
The University of Hawaii made the final four, but in the end it fell short, as did bids from New York’s Columbia University and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Each of the three runner-up institutions was promised some kind of secondary role.
“We were impressed by the quality of each proposal and, as a result, we plan to continue working with each institution to incorporate elements of their proposals into the future Obama Presidential Center,” Martin Nesbitt, foundation chairman, said in a news release.
