Bi-State Regional Commission works to bridge governments between Iowa and Illinois

Being a bi-state region puts the Quad-Cities in a complex position, especially when it comes to governments working together, but an aptly named organization takes pride in navigating those waters and helping make the region a better place for all.

The Bi-State Regional Commission was created as a municipal planning organization in 1966, following the merger of the Scott County Metropolitan Planning Commission and the Rock Island County Regional Planning Commission. The merger was done partly in response to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962, which required metropolitan areas to work together for transportation planning, according to information from Visit Quad Cities.

In 1974 the Henry County Regional Planning Commission merged with Bi-State, at the urging of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and due to Henry County's status as part of the three county Metropolitan Statistical Area, as defined by the Census Bureau. In 1976, Mercer County and Muscatine County joined the commission as well.

"We are a council of government, bringing government from around the five county region together to act as a forum for intergovernmental decision," principal planner Bryan Schmid said.

Of the 36 Bi-State commissioners on the board, 26 of them are elected officials within their own communities. Appointed citizens representing business, financing, housing, human services, labor, diversity and riverfront planning, make up the 10 non-elected board positions.

Schmid said the diversity of the board is necessary to complete many of the governmental duties the board has, like creating websites, writing grants, contract-based planning and zoning reviews, in addition to the transportation side.

"We have a pretty broad mission (of) trying to serve as many communities in our region as we can," Schmid said.

That can get tricky, considering each state has its own rules and regulations. Schmid, however, sees it as a benefit to have two sides of the same coin to view, and learn from.

"We work hard to try and keep our contracts up to date," he said. "We have to learn how each state operates and each one operates differently, but we find that it's an opportunity to look at what we're doing and take the best from both states and transfer that to the region as a whole."

With transportation being one of the main focuses of Bi-State, the commission has to take care to heed to each state's long range transportation plan as it looks to incorporate that into the regional plan. That's where the staff's knowledge of grant writing and having state and federal contacts makes them crucial for accomplishing long-term goals.

"The missions for the Iowa and Illinois Departments of Transportation vary, but on a regional level we're able to meet both sets of goals," Schmid said. "We are the point of contact for a lot of information flowing from the federal to the state to the local governments."

The responsibility of transportation planning comes with the territory of being a municipal planning organization, Schmid said. Every community with more than 50,000 residents must have one and is required to do transportation planning on some level.

Communities with a population greater than 200,000 have more requirements and need to go through a more robust planning process. With the Quad-Cities region having around double that number, the Bi-State Regional Commission is tasked with developing a traffic model that can input individual projects into the plan, to determine how it affects the whole network.

Arguably the biggest recent project the commission was part of was the construction of the new Interstate 74 bridge connecting Moline and Bettendorf. Discussions started way back in 1994 when the Illinois Department of Transportation asked about a holistic study of bridge needs from Interstate 280 to Interstate 80, and the commission agreed.

Traffic congestion on the I-74 bridge was a major problem, as it was designed to only handle around 48,000 vehicles a day rather than the 80,000 it was actually seeing. For years following, the existing bridge was subject to many studies while multiple organizations worked together to secure funding.

In 2008 the final study was completed, and in 2009 the Federal Highway Administration accepted the project, according to previous reporting. Up until this point, local and state officials as well as the Bi-State Regional Commission were doing all they could to find funding for the project. The studies, contracts and construction all came to cost more than $1 billion.

As the Quad-Cities looked on, Bettendorf and Moline prepared for the new bridge. From 2009 to 2018 both sides of the river worked on improving and building roads heading for the bridge, demolishing buildings, constructing on and off-ramps and deciding how everything was going to look. Finally, in 2018, construction on the bridge itself began and it opened officially on Dec. 1, 2021.

Schmid said part of the reason it took so long to replace the former I-74 bridge was not only due to the massive physical size of the project, but because it impacts so many people. For decades, the region kept it as a priority and a long range project that required the entire area to pull in one direction to see it reach construction.

Everything from tracking the project development through preliminary engineering reports to site selection and going through the actual engineering process before any construction can even begin had to be completed, he said.

"With projects of that magnitude, you want to make sure that this is a priority," he said. "All of those steps needed to be included in our short range plan. As those mile markers are achieved, the project keeps moving forward."