The Obama Presidential Center cost nearly $1 billion to build, the Obama Foundation said Saturday.
The exact price tag clocks in at $909 million, which is $59 million more than the center’s previously released figure of $850 million.
Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said the increase is due to “additional amenities” added to the campus.
“We … made the campus extraordinary beyond what we had originally intended, and we [are] going to continue to do that,” she said.
The amount — all privately funded — doesn’t include the $123 million in publicly paid-for infrastructure improvements made in and around the site.
And the foundation is preparing to spend more on the center.
Jarrett said the organization’s board decided Thursday to create a capital budget to fund ongoing maintenance at the center. She expects the board to approve a capital budget at the end of the year.
“We don’t want to defer maintenance the way a lot of institutions do and then have to play catch up,” Jarrett said.
The updated construction price was among a score of new figures released by the foundation to mark the center’s 100th day of operation, which is Saturday.
The foundation reported 175,469 ticketed patrons from 50 states and 39 countries have visited the center’s 225-foot tall granite Museum Tower since the campus, at 6001 S. Stony Island Ave., opened June 19.
More than 61,000 museum visitors were Illinois residents.
The attendance figures don’t include those who visited the other destinations on the five-building, 19-acre campus and the park space that surrounds it, the foundation said.
Among the other highlights over the last 100 days includes: four marriage proposals at the center; three bald eagles sighted; 11,424 Obama Burgers served up at Tafari’s Kitchen restaurant and 150 people dancing the Electric Slide on the John Lewis Plaza.
Also, the Chicago Public Library branch has drawn 206,684 patrons, which would put its visitorship on par with the Harold Washington Center. And nearly 430 pounds of produce have been grown in the campus’ Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit and Vegetable Garden, with the yield donated to the Hyde Park-Kenwood Food Pantry. There have also been 997 students visiting the campus on field trips.
“There were a lot of people who said, ‘Why are you building such a big campus?'” Jarrett said. “And now they know.”
If museum visitorship remains constant over the course of a year, attendance figures would clock in at about 640,000 — surpassing the 600,000 annual visitors that foundation officials originally estimated.
The nation’s most popular presidential center, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, attracted 207,000 visitors in its first four months after opening in 1991, the Los Angeles Times reported then.
“It’s an awful lot [of visitors],” Jarrett said of the center’s attendance numbers. “It exceeds our wildest expectations.”
An Obama Foundation spokesperson said the center’s updated construction cost will appear next year on the organization’s IRS Form 990, the publicly accessible document that tax-exempt organizations must file.