Minooka files lawsuit to enforce weight limits on McLinden Road

The Minooka Village Board confirmed its intent to file a lawsuit against Canadian National and its subsidiary, Wisconsin Central Limited, to find out whether it can enforce its pre-set weight limits on McLinden Road.

Village Attorney Mike Santschi said the village has an ordinance restricting vehicles to a 40-ton weight limit from Minooka Road to the CSX rail crossing, which drops to 25 tons at Twin Rail Drive and 8 tons before reaching 6 at the end of the road.

“CN has sent a letter expressing their opinion that the ordinance is preempted by federal law and, therefore, not effective,” Santschi said. “This is a declaratory judgment action, which is a way of saying to a court there’s a current controversy. It’s a significant dispute. It has important ramifications, so give us a judgment based on what the law actually says.”

Santschi said the purpose of the lawsuit is to figure out whether the village has the authority to enforce a weight restriction on McLinden Road.

Canadian National purchased about 900 acres of land west of McLinden Road in 2019 with intentions to develop it into an intermodal logistics hub. Most of the land resides in Channahon, and it has been zoned I-2 intensive industrial and has been for more than 20 years, according to previous stories from The Morris Herald-News.

“They’ve indicated they want to use McLinden as an access point,” Santschi said. “They’re disputing the village’s ability to enforce that ordinance in that location because of the effect it’ll have on their future development.”

CN cited the U.S. Surface Transportation Board’s December 2014 decision that “categorically prevents states and localities from imposing requirements that, by their nature, could be used to deny a rail carrier’s ability to conduct rail operations.”

Santschi said CN has other options such as moving trucks onto Route 6 to Brisbin Road, which already is scheduled to undergo construction to expand its lanes and make it friendlier to truck traffic.

Village President Ric Offerman said CN is talking more than a million trucks per year when the project gets fully built out.

“When they came the first time, they wanted all the trucks to come [on] McLinden, and their figure was a million trucks per year when it gets built out,” Offerman said. “They might have underestimated, so you figure that out. The only thing they threw at us, the only crumb we got was, ‘We’ll do a fourth,’ which is still 250,000 trucks.”

Santschi said there’s also the greater issue of how the rest of the area develops.

What’s the regional transportation plan?

“That’s not really the dispute here,” Santschi said. “The dispute here is that the village has an ordinance, and does it apply. How they route their traffic around that, those are a different set of issues for a different time.”

CN said there would be a public open house at some point, but the date keeps moving back, Village Administrator Dan Duffy said. CN originally said there would be one in December, but that changed to January, which moved to February and then March.

“Our concern is, listen, it’s a big impact,” Duffy said. “It’s going to have a big impact on the entire region. The region should know about it prior. The biggest reason why is because it’s a raw piece of 900 acres of farmland. If you want to tweak it and change things, now’s the perfect time. The last thing you want to do is put a plan together and take it to get approved and then the public finds out, because then you can’t change it.”

Santschi said the discussion’s purpose now is to help everyone plan. If the ordinance is enforceable, CN has time to plan around that instead of getting too far into the project to change it.

Duffy said he’d like to see a CN-Grundy-Channahon-Minooka plan so everyone has input to make the project work for the future.

“Channahon did a great job setting up the initial jurisdictional meetings with the taxing districts, fire departments, all three communities, and Grundy County senators and representatives,” Duffy said, referring to Channahon, Minooka and Morris. “So, we can get together and give our input as a team in this area, but if CN isn’t going to listen to us as a team, it makes it tough. We just want a plan that incorporates our information as well. Not just us, but Channahon and Grundy County.”

The teaming communities met in May to discuss the project together, and they applied for a grant to receive $400,000 for additional research and planning.