The engineering firm tasked with designing former President Barack Obama's presidential library has been hit with a $40 million lawsuit from a Chicago-based subcontractor alleging racial discrimination, the Chicago Tribune reported.

II in One Concrete, which is part of the Concrete Collective, a joint venture on the project that includes Trice Construction Co. and W.E. O'Neill Construction Co., was hired as a subcontractor by Thornton Tomasetti, which is providing structural engineering and protective design services for the Obama Presidential Center.

Robert McGee, one of the owners of the Chicago-based Black-owned company sued New York-based Thornton Tomasetti in federal court earlier this month, seeking to be compensated for roughly $40 million in construction costs the local company covered itself along with its joint venture partners.

McGee alleges Thornton Tomasetti repeatedly changed the project's standards and subjected his company to "excessively rigorous and unnecessary inspection," resulting in "extensive paperwork that impacted productivity and resulted in millions in losses," according to the lawsuit.

"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 reads.

According to the lawsuit, the members of the Concrete Collective were "subjected to baseless criticism and defamatory and discriminatory accusations" by Thornton Tomasetti.

"Moreover, Bob McGee was aware and supportive of the Obama Foundation's diversity and inclusion goals for the Project and never imagined that the Obama Foundation's structural engineer would single out a minority-owned subcontractor for unfair criticism and falsely accuse II in One of lacking sufficient qualifications and experience to perform its Work, while, in the same letter, stating that the non-minority-owned contractors were sufficiently qualified," the lawsuit reads.

Thornton Tomasetti pushed back against that claims from II in One Concrete, saying the construction delays and cost overruns "were all unequivocally driven by the underperformance and inexperience."

Obama created the We Can Build It initiative to hire local workers, contractors, and firms owned by minorities, women, veterans, LGBTQ individuals, and people with disabilities to build his presidential center, which he envisioned as being both a traditional presidential museum coupled with a leadership training institute.

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