With the election and lots of other news last week, you’re forgiven if you missed an announcement that brought good tidings to Illinois and the Chicago area.

Hyundai Translead, North America’s leading semitrailer builder, struck an agreement with the state to establish major new manufacturing facilities in Will County, creating close to 2,500 new Illinois jobs.

There’s more to the deal, of course, including the usual array of tax incentives any state uses to lure such a significant private-sector investment, but to read the comments of Hyundai Translead CEO Sean Kenney, Illinois’ geographic and infrastructure attributes had more to do with the decision than subsidies.

Speaking last week to industry peers at the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council show in Nashville, Tennessee, Lockport native Kenney enthused about Joliet and its environs as he disclosed the news. Remarking that more than 500 of his company’s customers are located within 100 miles of the future facility, he was quoted by industry publication Transport Topics as saying, “Joliet is actually central to all things logistics.”

He told the publication, “For us, this move is about getting closer to our customers.”

Music to our ears.

Hyundai Translead currently makes its trailers in Mexico, so this announcement isn’t good news only for Illinois and the Southland, it’s good news for the country. That the company chose Illinois as its first such operation outside of Mexico is even more of a feather in our state’s cap.

It gets better. Instead of building from the ground up, Hyundai Translead will be converting two mothballed plants, one formerly used by Caterpillar and the other the facility of the ill-starred and now-bankrupt electric bus maker Lion Electric. Just to make the symbolism even more powerful, Caterpillar closed the Joliet plant seven years ago, shifting those jobs to Mexico.

Caterpillar, of course, moved its headquarters four years ago to Texas from north suburban Deerfield, delivering a major psychological blow to Illinois. The state’s economic reputation suffered mightily from the departure of Caterpillar’s headquarters; Caterpillar had been an Illinois company for more than 90 years before that.

Lion Electric’s implosion shortly after Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration negotiated generous tax incentives for the electric school buses that were to be built in Joliet was a different kind of blow — an undermining of Pritzker’s focus on electric vehicles as an industry of the future in reviving Illinois manufacturing.

So the news delivered in Nashville was a most welcome vote of confidence in a state that sorely needs it. Hyundai will invest $450 million to convert the two facilities. Kenney deserves credit for his imaginative (and cost-effective) willingness to split the new operation between two formerly moribund locations and bring them back to life. The state’s $69 million tax-incentive package is in the typical range for such splashy deals and is well worth the long-term payoff.

We’ve criticized the governor in the past for policies we view as holding Illinois back economically, but throughout his seven years in office he consistently has been an enthusiastic cheerleader and marketer for a state that has so many attributes, as attested by Southland native son Kenney. Pritzker deserves credit for this unvarnished win.

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