Timetable for Obama Presidential Center’s groundbreaking, opening still uncertain nearly four years after the Jackson Park project was announced

For Charles Birnbaum, the founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington, D.C., it’s not the slow pace of the review that’s most frustrating. It’s the way consulting parties have been treated throughout the process: placed on mute during public meeting conference calls and not invited to meet in person.

“There’s been so little engagement, for us to be an official consulting party,” Birnbaum said. “Preservation is a negotiation. There’s (normally) a give and take in the process. … There’s a discourse that happens that hasn’t happened here.”