With Mayor John Kahl saying their “backs are against the wall,” city leaders in East Peoria have approved an updated floodplain ordinance that adds more than 400 properties to the risk area.
Two weeks after members expressed reluctance and frustration over the matter, the East Peoria City Council voted 4-0, with one absence, to adopt the new flood maps in accordance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s [FEMA] update for Tazewell County.
“There’s ramifications if the city doesn’t approve it, and I will tell you, I was looking to put this off and see if there’s any other last-ditch efforts we could try,” said Kahl.
The new maps add around 430 properties to East Peoria’s floodplain, requiring owners with federally backed mortgages to have flood insurance. Those properties could face an estimated annual increase in insurance expenses of more than $2,000.
City attorney Scott Brunton told the council that although approving the changes left a bitter taste, the consequences of not doing so before the Sept. 7 deadline would be even more detrimental.
“If we don’t approve these maps, the city falls out of the what’s called the FIRM [Flood Insurance Rate Map], the flood insurance program at the federal level, and the city gets suspended,” said Brunton. “But that doesn’t directly impact the city.
“In fact, who it does impact is any property owner in a newly designated flood area or a previously designated flood area. They will no longer have access to flood insurance and that puts them at jeopardy with their mortgages, their federally backed mortgages.”
Brunton also said failing to adopt FEMA’s maps would limit East Peoria’s eligibility to access federal disaster funding.
City commissioner Mike Sutherland, the only member who voted against the first reading of the ordinance at the previous meeting, was not present for Tuesday’s action. Kahl said he didn’t want to speak for Sutherland, but was under the impression he had reversed his stance after having an outside law firm look into the matter.
Brunton said despite the approval of the new floodplain ordinance, the city still has an opportunity to continue trying to get FEMA to reconsider.
“Even though these maps are put into place, there is a map amendment process — there’s a couple different processes that can be still pursued and will be pursued,” said Brunton, noting the East Peoria Drainage and Levee District and the Greater Peoria Sanitary District are also in the fight.
“This is a group effort, and they’re all involved and need to work together — and have been working together. But some of this information that we got, kind of at the last hour, was a bit of a surprise.”
Brunton said East Peoria already had received an extension for adopting the new floodplain, as FEMA’s new flood maps for Tazewell County actually went into effect in July. He told the council FEMA typically updates the flood maps on a county-by-county basis every 15-20 years, and the last partial update that impacted East Peoria was in the mid-2010s.
“They kind of put on hold a major portion of that, including the Levee District because they knew the city at that time was working to have the levees recertified. There was no issue with them per se, but you have to go through [a process] to recertify a levy that requires some engineering review,” said Brunton.
“These maps don’t get changed very often, so it’s definitely not to anybody’s benefit to wait until the next time it goes through because you just never know when that’s going to be. It could be decades.”
As another part of the ordinance, East Peoria increased the “freeboard” — raising the minimum distance between a structure’s base floor elevation and the finished floor elevation from one-tenth of an inch to one full inch as requested by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
