The legal battle over Love’s Travel Stop goes into 2022

A residents’ lawsuit challenging the Love’s Travel Stop planned for Joliet appears to have delayed construction for another year since being filed in December 2018.

Whether the truck stop planned for the Interstate 80 intersection at Briggs Street gets built in 2022 could depend on the success of the lawsuit, which contends the Love’s site was illegally annexed into Joliet.

Plaintiffs led by former council member Warren Dorris appear to be preparing to continue the legal fight even as one city official said he expects a resolution in the case, which includes Love’s and the city of Joliet as defendants, in the coming months.

Residents have created a website and Go Fund Me page seeking to attract attention and funding to their cause.

“What I’m hearing around town is people don’t really know about this,” said Jacquenette Cottrell, a New Lenox Road resident who is among the neighborhood plaintiffs in the case. “We need people to come back and get involved. We need momentum.”

People were involved in 2018 when the City Council approved the project in a 6-3 vote that annexed the site into Joliet. Residents who live nearby along New Lenox Road contended it would bring too many trucks close to home and onto an already overloaded segment of Briggs Street.

“There’s so much traffic on Briggs first thing in the morning and at the end of the day because of the warehouses we have already,” Diane Decero-Farias said. “Now we’re going to add to that, and it’s not right.”

Decero-Farias and her husband have lived along New Lenox Road since 2017.

“Two days after we bought the house, we saw an article about Love’s truck stop,” she said. “We had no idea it was happening.”

She and other homeowners who are near the the Love’s Travel Stop site live in a section of Joliet Township that is outside Joliet city limits and would remain outside if the truck stop is built. They have no say in the election of city officials who decided the future of their neighborhood.

“We have no voice here,” Decero-Farias said. “They come in, and they do whatever they want to do, and they don’t care because we’re not their constituents. I think that’s the part that really bothers me the most.”

The truck stop is seen as a potential boon to the city. Love’s is getting a $2.5-million tax incentive package based on expectations that the truck stop will generate about $1 million a year in sales taxes from fuel and other products.

Love’s anticipates the travel center will attract 600 trucks and 2,400 cars a day.

The tax incentives would offset the expense Love’s faces in extending city water and sewer lines to the site. The extension of utilities creates the potential for more development at what some city officials view as an underdeveloped interchange area.

There are two gas stations at Briggs Street and I-80 but not the restaurants, hotels and other businesses seen at many interchanges.

The East Joliet Fire Department is nearby, and fire officials have voiced opposition to the project since 2018 because of the additional congestion they expect outside the Briggs Street station.

Fire Chief Kirk Kelly said it’s already a challenge to get fire engines and ambulances out of the fire station to where they need to go.

“The traffic on this side of town is horrible, and adding a truck stop will make it more horrible,” Kelly said. “There is no infrastructure there to support something of that size.”

The project does require improvements at the Briggs Street intersections that lead to I-80. But Kelly is skeptical that they will be sufficient and said the fire department has not been consulted on what road improvements are needed.

Love’s and attorneys representing the company did not respond to requests for comment.

Joliet Asssistant City Attorney Chris Regis, however, said he believes there is an end in sight for the litigation over the truck stop.

“We hope to have it resolved this spring,” Regis said. “We believe we’ll get it worked out, or we’ll go to trial.”

Regis deferred to Love’s as to whether the company would begin construction before the lawsuit is resolved.

There is no court order stopping Love’s from starting construction, said Timothy Buckley, attorney for the plaintiffs.

“They may choose to go ahead with it, but I think there are issues,” Buckley said. “They build at their own peril if there’s a lawsuit.”