Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance Adoption Tracking Dashboard
Description
To create an internal GeoHUB ESRI Dashboard to make our Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance Adoption Tracking more efficient and timely than our current processes. We are the NJ State NFIP Coordinators office and one of our responsibilities is to coordinate and assist 555 municipalities adopt new Flood Ordinances. The adoption process has many steps or statuses that we track for each municipality. We have tracked using Excel and currently using SharePoint created by a contractor. These current processes are not meeting our needs.
Problem Statement
There is no convenient way to make the progress of ordinance adoptions apparent to upper management, and no easy way to report to FEMA the adoption progress of new flood ordinances.
Project Justification
The dashboard would make the progress of the ordinance adoptions very visible for our immediate supervisors and our program’s upper management to see if the different municipalities are on schedule and if any obstacles are occurring.
Also, we report to FEMA on the adoption progress of new flood damage prevention ordinances and have hard deadlines. FEMA needs to approve adoptions for a community to be in the NFIP (National Flood Insurance Program). If deadlines are not met, a community could be suspended from the NFIP.
By creating our own adoption tracking system with a Dashboard, we would eliminate the dependency and cost from using a contractor
Also, we report to FEMA on the adoption progress of new flood damage prevention ordinances and have hard deadlines. FEMA needs to approve adoptions for a community to be in the NFIP (National Flood Insurance Program). If deadlines are not met, a community could be suspended from the NFIP.
By creating our own adoption tracking system with a Dashboard, we would eliminate the dependency and cost from using a contractor
Estimated Transactions
nearly every municipality must update Flood ordinances for any changes to Fed rules, NJ rules, FEMA flood mapping.
Target Rollout Date
1 April 2026
Target Rollout Date Reason
None
Linked work items
relates to
IPTD-128
Flood Ordinance management
![Assignee:]()
IPTD-27
Floodplain Administrative Review Portal
![Assignee:]()
IPTD-581
RBDH O&M Flood Dashboard
![Assignee:]()
IPTD-128
Flood Ordinance management
Idea
IPTD-27
Floodplain Administrative Review Portal
Idea
IPTD-581
RBDH O&M Flood Dashboard
Idea
Activity
Show:
After review of the current process and technology on Jan 12 (Recap: Seeking direction on the Flood Ordinance Tracker project Monday, January 12 | Meeting | Microsoft Teams) and internal discussion with DOIT (see attached Jan 21 email) the direction forward advised was to continue to retain the current vendor and use their provided sharepoint backed solution. DEP is not planning to host its own production Sharepoint site and cannot readily replicate the shared document management already in place with any enterprise platform. Alternatives figure to be cost prohibitive and would take a long time. One promising non-technical consideration was the potential for rule changes that might allow for more incorporation of FEMA decisions and mapping by reference that might drop out many loops of local ordinance updating.
Link to Flow Chart Document
Link to Pro Con Table Document
link to current/initial flood ordinance tracker: Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance Adoption Project
descriptions of 4 attachments added 11/20/25:
NJMCCO Floodplain Ordinance Project – Standard Operating Procedures: Outlines the general process for ordinance adoptions on the current Sharepoint. Our current Sharepoint tracks points of contact/information on municipalities, stages in the adoption process/notes from reviewers, and higher standards that municipalities adopted. It also contains a repository of ordinances from each town at different points in the adoption process.
Guide to Reviewing Floodplain Ordinances: This document discusses the stages of ordinance adoptions in more depth, with some pointers for reviewers to look for in draft ordinances and contains links to relevant materials on our Sharepoint (that you will hopefully get access to soon).
Ordinance Tracking Project Sheet: Describes the changes we would want to make to the current system
Coastal Model Code Coordinated Ordinance: This is one of our 2 model code coordinated ordinances that we request municipalities to use as a starting point for their ordinance adoption. The municipalities would use either this model or our riverine model depending on what type of flood zones are in their jurisdiction.
I have been exploring the potential to leverage eCode360/General Code for this need along with lots of other needs. I have an inquiry into eCode and have raised this potential with Innovation.
See attached emails about larger concept that might bring together multiple needs across several agencies. eCode360 describes full platform services that enable use by municipalities and its stakeholders (which in reality include including state and Fed agencies). Will need to see what can actually be done.
In the meantime, I will be organizing a meeting with the program, GIS staff (Ed A. and John Flemming) who have left the program with the impression that GIS does not offer a solution, plus Kurt (or designee), plus Jim B. (or designee) to understand what didn’t work in GIS, and what might work or be needed elsewhere to support the needs. The IT project sheet here only describes a solution relying on GIS tools and presumably would have leveraged a lot of program expertise in its execution.