Minooka Village President Ric Offerman said during his State of the Village address that the village has reached a settlement with Canadian National in its lawsuit to keep semis off some of its main roads.

Canadian National’s Chicago Logistics Hub is a new construction hub along U.S. Route 6 across from AuxSable Liquid Products and LyondellBasell.

While it is in Channahon’s village limits, initial proposals would have had the majority of the truck traffic funneled onto McLinden Road and Ridge Road in Minooka.

The Village of Minooka’s lawsuit was filed to ensure it would be allowed to enforce its already-existing 40-ton weight limit on McLinden Road.

“In 2024, they came to a meeting and said, ‘We’re so glad to meet you,’ ” Offerman said. “They were very polite. ‘We’re going to gift you with a million trucks a year.’ We said ‘no, thank you. That’s approximately 999,999 more than we’d like to see.’ ”

Canadian National and its subsidiary, Wisconsin Central Limited, didn’t want to comply with the limits the village already had in place, which is why it ended up in court.

According to Offerman, a federal judge told Canadian National that the laws it was citing, allowing it to go against the village’s pre-existing limits, wouldn’t apply in this case.

The next week, the Village of Minooka got a note asking if the village would consider settling.

“We had one week of really tough, really dramatic, going after each other, negotiations,” Offerman said. “You wouldn’t believe how good that team was. Their name was Dan Duffy.”

Duffy is the village administrator, and Offerman said he negotiated 99.9% of the settlement.

“It’s not a perfect settlement, but I can tell you that there won’t be a million trucks coming down that road,” Offerman said.

According to the settlement agreement, Wisconsin Central will pay the village $5.5 million for road maintenance and for reconstruction of McLinden Road, and it will prohibit heavy trucks from using the road to access the 900-acre park.

Truck traffic will instead go through the Route 6 entrance and the Brisbin Road exit onto Interstate 80.