The Joliet NorthPoint development settlement, approved unanimously by the Joliet City Council on June 20, 2025, resolves years of litigation over a massive Will County warehouse project by cutting its size, banning trucks from local roads, and moving road maintenance costs off the city’s books. The agreement is authorized under Ordinance 374-25 and binds seven parties: the City of Joliet, NorthPoint Development, CenterPoint Properties Trust, CenterPoint Joliet Terminal Railroad, Houbolt Road Extension JV, East Gate-Logistics Park Chicago, and New Wave Farms.
What the Settlement Changes
The deal rewrites the terms under which NorthPoint’s Compass Global Logistics Hub can be built, and it does so in ways the city says will save taxpayers money for decades.
Trucks Are Pushed Onto a Closed-Loop Network
Every truck entering or leaving the development must travel on a “Closed Loop Truck Network” designed to keep heavy vehicles off Joliet’s local streets. NorthPoint’s previously permitted emergency truck access to Route 53 is permanently terminated. Only passenger cars belonging to warehouse employees are allowed on Route 53.
A permanent cul-de-sac will be built on Millsdale Road east of the Union Pacific Railroad. That physical barrier blocks through-traffic and stops vehicles from reaching Route 53 through residential areas. It also removes a free truck route that would have competed with the Houbolt Road toll bridge, which is the piece CenterPoint had been fighting to protect.
Road Maintenance Shifts to the Developers
Joliet is no longer responsible for maintaining the roads and bridges inside the closed-loop network. The city says the change will save “hundreds of millions of dollars in the long term.” Mayor Terry D’Arcy estimated that the original annexation arrangement would have cost taxpayers roughly $100 million in the first 20 years alone.
The Project Is Smaller
NorthPoint CEO Nathaniel Hagedorn confirmed that the development has been scaled back from up to 40 million square feet of industrial space to 25 million square feet, all of it subject to the closed-loop traffic plan.
A Regional Traffic Study Is Required
NorthPoint and East Gate must fund and conduct a regional traffic study, submitted to Joliet, Will County, and CenterPoint. The stated goal is to keep trucks on major roadways and out of downtown Joliet. Later construction phases will require additional comprehensive traffic studies approved by the City of Joliet.
Houbolt Road Is Reaffirmed as the Truck Route
The settlement re-establishes the Houbolt Road Bridge, the 1.5-mile privately funded toll road connecting I-80 to the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, as the “long-term solution to reduce truck traffic on local roads.” It includes an amendment to the original 2016 Memorandum of Understanding between IDOT, Will County, Joliet, and the toll bridge operator.
Payments and Legal Fees
NorthPoint agreed to pay all legal fees accrued during the negotiations. The settlement also includes monetary payments from NorthPoint to CenterPoint, the amounts of which were not disclosed.
Which Lawsuits the Settlement Ends
The agreement resolves two of the main pieces of NorthPoint-related litigation. The first is the 2022 Will County suit filed by Houbolt Road Extension JV, LLC (Case No. 2022 MR 138), which alleged that Joliet’s 2021 annexation agreement with East Gate-Logistics Park Chicago violated restrictive covenants in the 2016 MOU governing the toll bridge. The circuit court had dismissed the case; the appellate court reversed in July 2023 and sent it back for further proceedings.
The second is the federal antitrust action NorthPoint and East Gate filed against CenterPoint in the Northern District of Illinois in 2024 (Case No. 24 C 3742), which sought to invalidate the MOU provision restricting truck access to Millsdale Road. The federal court had stayed that case in September 2024 pending the state litigation.
Two other legal fights sit outside the settlement. In January 2024, the Illinois Appellate Court (Third District) reinstated private nuisance claims for six plaintiffs in Stop NorthPoint, LLC’s suit against the city, along with a public nuisance count, sending both back for further proceedings. Stop NorthPoint’s leader has said the organization will continue pursuing what he called “quality-of-life lawsuits.” And in February 2024, the same appellate court ruled in the Village of Elwood’s favor, blocking NorthPoint from imposing a bridge over Route 53 at Walter Strawn Drive on the village.
Approvals Still Needed
The settlement does not itself complete the closed-loop network. NorthPoint still needs regulatory approvals from the Illinois Commerce Commission for railroad access and from IDOT for a bridge over Route 53 before the full truck-routing plan can be built.
How the Project Got Here
NorthPoint Development proposed the Compass Global Logistics Hub on roughly 2,900 acres of largely unincorporated farmland between Elwood and Manhattan in Will County, positioned near existing intermodal rail facilities. The Joliet City Council gave preliminary approval to a pre-annexation agreement on April 17, 2020, in a 6-3 vote, with Mayor Bob O’Dekirk casting the deciding vote. That original deal covered about 1,300 acres and called for a bridge over Route 53 to support a closed-loop truck network, with bridge construction required before any building permit could issue. Later annexation agreements in December 2020 and December 2021 expanded the footprint to approximately 3,800 acres.
Opposition was broad and sustained. A 2020 traffic study commissioned by the Village of Manhattan projected that the development would generate an additional 10,370 trucks per day at full build-out; a separate analysis cited by opponents estimated 53,000 total daily trips, including 16,000 trucks. The villages of Elwood and Manhattan, Jackson and Manhattan townships, three local school districts, the Elwood Fire Protection District, Will County, and multiple veterans’ organizations all went on record against the project, citing traffic, diesel pollution, strain on I-80, and the impact on nearby Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery.
Mayor D’Arcy described the settlement talks as 18 months of “very intense” and “grueling” negotiations, and framed the deal as the best outcome available given that fighting the original “lopsided” annexation agreement in court would have cost “many millions.”
Reaction
Council member Suzanna Ibarra said no amount of pressure could have made her vote for something she did not believe was “absolutely the best thing for my district.”
Local officials outside Joliet were less satisfied. Jackson Township Supervisor Matt Robbins objected to the speed of the vote, saying residents had not seen the 57-page agreement before the meeting: “We don’t know if it’s good or bad for our community.” Jackson Township resident Michelle Peterson questioned how anyone could support an agreement with “really no information to look at.”
John Kieken, a leader of Stop NorthPoint, confronted the mayor during the meeting and told him, “You went back on your word.” Kieken said afterward that the settlement did not appear to require NorthPoint to make substantial concessions beyond payments to CenterPoint. Delilah LeGrett, Jackson Township Assessor and a member of Just Say No to NorthPoint, said, “We’ve seen for the last eight years that NorthPoint’s signature means nothing,” and said the group would continue fighting the project.
Where Construction Stands
Work has already begun on parts of the site. Peak Construction completed the shell of a one-million-square-foot building, designated Third Coast Intermodal Hub Building 1, in 2024. Two tenant improvement projects inside that building, totaling more than 734,000 square feet, were slated for completion in late 2025. The rest of the now-25-million-square-foot buildout depends on completion of the closed-loop truck network, including the bridges still awaiting state regulatory approval.