Wading through knee-deep water, Kelly McKay squinted in the evening light as the sun began to dip below the horizon. All around him, herons and other migratory birds darted between the dead trees that rose above the water, while turtles took shelter in the marsh’s tall grasses.
This is the Milan Bottoms, a massive wetland near the conjunction of the Rock and Mississippi rivers in western Illinois that’s home to over 150 endangered and threatened species. It’s also the largest known winter nighttime roost for migrating bald eagles in the lower 48 states.
Over the past year, McKay, a biologist who has done contract work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and several state Departments of Natural Resources, has spent hundreds of hours documenting the wetland’s wildlife in his free time. The wetland spans over 4,000 acres, owned by a patchwork of state and federal agencies as well as private parties. McKay, though, has limited his tracking work mostly to its southeastern edge, which backs up against Interstate 280, Illinois Route 92 and several developments — including a Bally’s casino.
As the Milan Bottoms have flourished over the years, the surrounding city of Rock Island has struggled to bring in commercial revenue, leading local developers to build closer and closer to the wetland.
“It has somehow maintained its health and quality for the biodiversity there, even as humans have continued to build more and more around it,” said Elizabeth VanCamp, a research assistant at Nahant Marsh, a wetland preserve directly across the Mississippi River from the Milan Bottoms.
Soon, local developers could bring another test to the wetlands’ ability to withstand human activity. Rock Island is poised to sell a 10-acre plot at the edge of the Milan Bottoms to A Hana Illowa LLC, a development company owned by local construction moguls Matt Stern and Jeff Hughbanks. The pair are planning to build a gas station and marijuana dispensary on the site, dubbed Casino West.
Supporters and opponents of the development alike share an admiration of the Milan Bottoms, and the unique ecosystem that it’s grown into over the years. At the same time, city officials say developing near the wetland could bring much-needed revenue. Rock Island’s poverty rate of about 21% is nearly double the overall poverty rate of the metro area, as reported by the Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce in 2022. While neighboring cities in Iowa can expand into surrounding farmland, Rock Island is bordered by rivers and has struggled to find places to develop.Located across from the Bally’s, and just a mile from the intersection of I-280 and Route 92, the Casino West site is seen by city officials as a crucial opportunity.
“As far as developable commercial sites in the city go, (Casino West) was basically viewed as probably the most valuable and most important commercial site in our portfolio,” said Miles Brainard, Rock Island’s community development manager. “We don’t really have very many sites at all that are very favorable to development.”
But ever since March, when the city held a news conference to promote the economic benefits of the development, Rock Islanders — and many residents from across the Quad Cities — have been protesting the project, fearing that it could drive bald eagles and other wildlife from the nearby marsh. Neither the city nor the developer has conducted an in-depth survey of the Casino West site to confirm that it’s not being used by endangered wildlife.
“Eagles are very sensitive, especially in the winter months, to any kind of disturbance, whether it’s light pollution or noise pollution,” said Brian Ritter, executive director of Nahant Marsh.
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Over the past year, two outside firms have conducted studies of the Casino West site, hoping to confirm that it isn’t being used by eagles and other endangered species.
One of these studies, commissioned by the city of Rock Island, didn’t include any on-the-ground surveys of the site, and concluded there wasn’t any risk of impacts to local wildlife. It also drew mainly from an IDNR database of where endangered species are located throughout the sites.
The other, commissioned by Hughbanks and Stern’s A Hana, reached the same conclusion. A surveyor from environmental consulting firm Terracon observed the site May 6 — two months after the usual conclusion of bald eagle night roost season — and didn’t find any eagle roosts. Hughbanks and Stern did not respond to several requests for comment.
The upper Mississippi has long been a critical winter habitat for bald eagles. Facing subzero temperatures and scarce food resources, eagles often seek out communal night roosts — tree stands where large groups of eagles will sleep during the night and hunt during the day from December to March. Eagles often take advantage of fish killed by freezing ice in both open waters and pools along the riverfront — an easy hunting ground for the winter before the eagles migrate north in the spring.
The Milan Bottoms weren’t always such a prominent eagle habitat. For much of the 20th century, the area was more of a seasonal wetland, serving as a floodplain for the Mississippi River when water levels rose in the springtime. But as commercial development and human-made drainage systems sprang up around the area, the natural flow of water was disrupted. Now, the Milan Bottoms are flooded year-round.
“Lots of the surrounding area is covered in these asphalt parking lots,” said McKay. “When you get a heavy rain, instead of soaking into the ground, all the water just runs into the creeks that then soaks into the Milan Bottoms.”
Rock Island has owned over 500 acres of the Milan Bottoms, including the 10-acre Casino West development, since 2022. This tract of land was previously owned by construction company RiverStone Group, which used the 10-acre plot on Route 92 as a “staging area” for its quarrying activities, Brainard said. But it largely stopped quarrying in southwest Rock Island in the mid-1900s, and the site had sat vacant for decades before the company handed it off to the city for $1 per parcel.
The city bought the land mostly because of the Casino West plot, Brainard, the community development manager, said. In July, the Rock Island City Council passed a resolution confirming its plans to start the process of placing other parts of the Milan Bottoms into a Land and Water Reserve through the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Working with IDNR to maintain the preserve could help make the marsh more sustainable into the future, city officials say.
“This vast wetland environment has sort of come into existence by accident, and has become an ecologically fascinating environment hosting a wide range of different species, and that’s pretty cool,” Brainard said, referring to the fact that Milan Bottoms used to be a seasonal wetland. “But as a result of it not being an original feature of the landscape, so to speak, it does require some level of planning and maintenance.”
According to a map of flooding projections in the Quad Cities area, produced by the National Wildlife Federation, Prairie Rivers Network and the University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute, climate change could cause floodwaters in the Milan Bottoms area to rise over 8 feet by 2050 during major events. The Casino West site is pretty much the only area of higher ground in the Milan Bottoms, which McKay said makes it a valuable nesting habitat for Blanding’s turtles and other reptiles that need to lay their eggs on dry land.From 2005 to 2011, the Army Corps, Quad Cities Audubon Society and several other groups funded a team of scientists, including McKay, to survey the Milan Bottoms and track eagle populations each winter. In addition to eagles and red-shouldered hawks, the wetland is also home to several other endangered and threatened species, including black-crowned night herons and Blanding’s turtles.
For the first three years, scientists observed that the most popular eagle roost site was found in the northwestern area of the Milan Bottoms, while a less popular roost site was slightly downstream the Mississippi River from there. McKay remembers seeing 400 to 800 eagles per night in the area, and most years, the study documented an average of 4,850 eagle sightings per year over the course of each three-month winter season.
But in 2008, the Bally’s casino was built directly across the road from the western edge of the wetlands. Over the next three years, scientists tracked a 7% increase in the proportion of eagles roosting in the downstream habitat, which they noted was a lower-quality habitat overall, along with a 4% decrease in eagles in the upstream habitat. While the upstream area still remained more popular over the years, the study notes that “eagles may have reacted to the casino development.”
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McKay points to the study as evidence that Rock Island’s proposed pollution mitigation measures “don’t work.”
“(Bally’s) uses downward pointing lights, and they’re a lot farther away from the night roosts than (the Casino West) development will be, and yet we still documented a (statistically) significant shift of eagles out of the optimum night roost area,” he said.
City zoning laws require all developments to take precautions to mitigate light, noise and air pollution as well as stormwater runoff. According to Brainard, one of the first steps the city took after buying the site was to test soil quality to make sure it was fit for construction.
“I get it. I mean, I understand the visual that people have a truck stop next to a wetland,” said Ald. Dylan Parker. “But you know, regulations have come a long way.”
After months of buzz, Rock Island has officially stopped accepting applications to develop the Casino West property, and will likely vote to sell the plot in the coming weeks. Parker said he’s not aware of any interested parties other than Hughbanks and Stern’s A Hana Illowa.
The sale won’t come without extra environmental protection requirements, though.
“Even though there’s no law that, to my understanding, requires this, we are now requiring the developer to consult with the U.S, Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the government agency that enforces the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act,” Parker said.
McKay and other local environmentalists said they’re going to keep pressuring the city until the last possible moment, continuing a monthslong tradition of protesting outside of Rock Island’s biweekly City Council meetings.
Yet with over $2 million in projected revenues from the Casino West development on the line, Brainard said the protests, many of which are coming from people who live outside of Rock Island, haven’t changed his mind about what’s best for the city.
“The city as an organization is beginning to really struggle to deliver essential services to the public,” he said. “So at this point, economic development is critical.”
Lily Carey is a freelancer.