Wednesday's euphoria for Huntsville over landing the $1.6 billion Toyota-Mazda plant began with failure.

It began almost a decade ago when city officials were pursuing the Volkswagen plant that eventually took its $1 billion plant with 2,000 jobs to Chattanooga.

"When Volkswagen came, we weren't ready," Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said Wednesday night.

Press reports in the summer of 2008 had Huntsville as the favorite to land the Volkswagen plant. Now almost 10 years later, Toyota-Mazda will build their plants on the same patch of land in rural Limestone County that was pitched to Volkswagen.

And that's because this time, Huntsville was ready.

"They went up in a helicopter, we showed them one piece of property, they looked at another and they said, 'Can y'all get that?' and we went after it," Battle said. "But we didn't have the soil compaction, we didn't have the environmental, we didn't have the utilities to the site. We didn't have plans on roadways. We didn't have everything necessary to make those sites a success. We took a learning lesson off of the loss of Volkswagen."

Battle was campaigning for his first term as mayor when Volkswagen chose Chattanooga on July 15, 2008. Less than three months later, Battle defeated mayoral incumbent Loretta Spencer and he's been re-elected in two landslides before launching a gubernatorial campaign last year.

And Mark Yarbrough, Limestone County Commission chair, pointed to Battle as the leader of the effort to bring Toyota-Mazda to north Alabama.

"He gets embarrassed and doesn't like me to say it but I made the quote today that he is like the quarterback but he really is," Yarbrough said. "To get somebody to rally behind, you've got to have somebody to rally behind. If he's got an ego, you can't find it.

"Everybody laughs when I talk about the 4:30 a.m. phone calls but they're real. I get them from him. Rise and shine, guys, it's time to get to work."

Battle said in the aftermath of the Volkswagen defeat, there was work to be done to prepare the site for the next big thing that came along.

"We started work on this property about nine years ago - right after we lost the Volkswagen bid," Battle said. "We came in No. 2 on that. We talked about what we needed to do to be more competitive. And we started work on this property.

"We did the compaction tests, the environmental tests, making sure the utilities was all to the site. That was our job to make sure we were ready when somebody came along."

Those tests hadn't been done when Volkswagen inquired a decade ago.

The day VW announced it had chosen Chattanooga, Neal Wade, the director of the Alabama Development Office told The Huntsville Times that the lacking work on the site was a factor.

"We've known from the very beginning this was an uphill battle, because the site in Tennessee already has a lot of infrastructure in place; a lot of site preparation and environmental work had been done," Wade said in that July 2008 interview.

"The VW site consultants picked a site in North Alabama in which none of the infrastructure, title or environmental work had been done. We were always behind from a site standpoint. We did all we could to catch up."

When Toyota-Mazda approached Huntsville officials about making a proposal, Battle showed them a site that ready to go. The site had been certified a TVA megasite in 2016 - a stamp of approval that basic infrastructure was in place to accommodate a large manufacturing plant to immediately start construction.

"We were ready to go," Battle said. "When they came in and they said they wanted to be able to locate a site in five months, we were able to do it."