More than a decade ago under then-Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, it looked like the Illiana Expressway, a west-to-east road connecting Interstate 55 to Interstate 65 in Indiana, was going to be built in Will County near Peotone.

The Illiana Expressway faced stiff opposition, mostly on environmental concerns, in federal court in 2014. The 50-mile highway was shelved in 2015 by then-Gov. Bruce Rauner by executive order.

The Illiana will likely never be built, but that hasn’t stopped the steady increase in traffic in the past 11 years. As trucks leaving intermodal facilities in western Will County and other vehicles look for shortcuts to I-65, County Highway 16 (12000 North Road) has been inundated with heavy traffic.

In addition, the intersection of 12000 North Road and Illinois Route 50 has become a dangerous intersection, resulting in dozens of accidents, some with fatalities.

Will County owns much of the jurisdiction of 12000 North Road, also known as North County Line Road, with the exception of a 4.27-mile stretch that belongs to Kankakee County. That will eventually end as the County Board’s Executive Committee gave initial approval Wednesday for the county to relinquish its jurisdiction of the stretch of the road from Illinois Route 50, east to Will Center Road (7700 East Road) and transfer it to Will County.

County Engineer Greg Heiden said Will County initially didn’t want to take the portion of the road, so Kankakee County began making plans to replace two bridges on the stretch about a year ago. Recently, Will County’s Engineer Jeff Ronaldson called Heiden back.

“‘You know what? I talked to my County Highway committee there, and they’re willing to take over the road, including the bridges,’” said Heiden on the call with Ronaldson. “Because they’re planning on doing a study of the whole portion of County Line Road, and they’d rather have the whole road to do the study on, do the work, rather than us having a piece.”

Heiden added it will make it easier for Will County to have the whole road to do the study to improve the entire stretch. It will come at a cost of $1.84 million to Kankakee County, too.

“The downside, I guess, if there is one, is when we give away a road,” he said. “Well, nobody takes a road for nothing. They’re going to need money to maintain that road as if we were going to do it ourselves. So what they agreed to was the price to rebuild the two bridges in that stretch of road.”

Heiden said the money will come out of the county’s bridge fund, and the dollar amount is there.

“We would have had to spend money to repair those bridges anyway, or replace them, actually,” he said.

Also, the county will be paying the $1.84 million in four yearly installments with no interest accrued. The county will also no longer maintain the road or plow snow on it.

“We’re giving away a roadway and a few dollars for that to be repaired up there,” County Board Vice Chairman Craig Long said. “It’s all in the effort to fix that North County Line area, the roundabout at Route 50, to save our people and to move traffic along.”

The transfer of jurisdiction of the road won’t become official until it’s approved by both county boards and the Illinois Department of Transportation. That should happen by the end of 2026.

“They want to do a master study and widen the road,” Heiden said. “They want to widen it more than we would have widened it. Let them do it all.”

Heiden says the road will likely be widened from Illinois Route 50 east to the state line.

Long said county officials recently met with Gia Biagi, secretary of IDOT, and she was adamant about fixing the route that the intermodal trucks use, including Peotone Road, Route 50 and North County Line Road.

“We don’t have the Illiana Expressway. We don’t have a four-lane highway,” Long said. “The next best thing to do is start fixing some of these secondary roads.”