At the September 28 public hearing, staff presented eliminating Highland Park’s separate floodplain map while retaining the FEMA framework. Staff estimated that about 600 properties were in the city-specific floodplain but not the FEMA floodplain.
Council questions focused on insurance, property impacts and flood protection. The engineering consultant said removal of the city-specific layer would not directly affect insurance rates. That is the consultant’s statement at the hearing, not an independent insurance or flood-risk assessment for any property.
Later in the same meeting, the council approved the stormwater-management, wetlands-protection and floodplain-regulation amendment seven to zero. The public hearing and the ordinance vote were separate actions.
The packet’s March 6 Civiltech analysis puts numbers behind the map difference: excluding Lake Michigan, it counts 567 parcels in the FEMA floodplain and 1,226 in the expanded local floodplain, a difference of 659. Those are mapped-parcel counts, not a prediction of which properties will flood; overlapping condominium parcels were counted as a single parcel.
The consultant described a tradeoff rather than the disappearance of flood risk. Expanded local maps provided an added margin of protection and future flexibility, while also adding development constraints and administrative work. Its recommendation was to remove the additional local layer while retaining FEMA, state water-resource and Lake County Watershed Development Ordinance requirements.
The September 28 minutes submitted for approval in the October 13 packet identify the adopted measure as Ordinance O35-2026. That copy corroborates the ordinance’s identity and action described in the recording; its later approval as minutes was not independently established in this review.