Former mayor and MP accuse Jon Raven’s council of illegal changes to mapping, leading to insurance hikes
A former mayor and a former federal MP have accused Logan City Council of implementing an illegal flood map that devalued land and led to skyrocketing insurance bills.
Logan, south of Brisbane, is one of Queensland’s fastest-developing areas, and twice this decade the city has experienced widespread flooding. This makes flood maps a controversial issue.
John Freeman, mayor of Logan from 2000 to 2006, says the council’s changes to flood maps without taking the right legal steps, such as consulting the community, led it into financial ruin.
In February 2022, council voted to approve a minor change to flood maps to account for the risk posed by climate change and ensure the maps are as up-to-date as possible.
But Freeman and former Forde MP Brett Raguse said this never happened, instead the council uploaded a non-legally binding “flood awareness map” to its planning website in October 2022 without formally updating the planning plan.
“This gave everyone zero legal protection, but gave insurance companies every excuse to raise premiums and refuse to insure residents and businesses through no fault of their own,” Freeman said.
Freeman said the map was not legal until the council voted to establish an emergency temporary local planning instrument (TLPI) in August 2023.
Speaking as a representative of the Logan Ratepayer association on Thursday morning, Freeman said TLPI allowed council to move this map into the Logan planning plan without public input.
“When they introduced this emergency TLPI in 2023, they resurrected that buried decision, dug it up, unearthed it and buried it again,” he said.
Mayor Jon Raven was chairman of the planning committee in 2022 and said he strongly supports the 2022 change. Freeman now urges him to stand down and reveal what he knows.
“This decision to circumvent legal safeguards led directly to a society-wide crisis that caused significant financial, mental and emotional stress,” he said.
“As Mayor Raven admitted, this blunder and cover-up affected 40,000 properties in Logan.”
Under guidelines referenced in the 2022 resolution, municipalities are required to notify every affected property owner of changes to flood mapping, but Freeman said that hasn’t happened.
A council spokesman said the council had not breached the law and was uploading the new maps in 2022 as part of an effort to share the latest available information with the public.
“The council has always followed state legislation, industry codes and a best practice approach throughout the flood mapping process,” they said.
Raven said the impact of flood maps is his number one priority and advocates for cheaper bills with insurance companies.
“Every day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, I think about how I can help residents with flood mapping,” he said.
“This all started before I was mayor, but now that I’m in this position, I’m doing everything I can to fix it.”
Darren Power, who was mayor at the time of the decision and is associated with Freeman and Raguse, said he thought councilors were “left in the dark” about the true impact of the new maps on residents.
Raguse, who is now president of the Logan Ratepayers Association, said the changes put a lot of pressure on the community.
“We’re seriously concerned, so we’re certainly pushing the council to do something, but also the state government to act on our behalf,” he said.
Freeman said the group had written to Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Jarrod Bleijie and Local Government Minister Ann Leahy asking them to investigate the situation and pause the ongoing process of the new Logan planning scheme until there was clarity.
Bleijie and Leahy have been contacted for comment.
The measures introduced by the TLPI are being reviewed by an independent investigator brought in by the council, with a particular focus on the matrix where thousands of properties are deemed to be at high risk.
This imprint saw a home insurance bill in suburban Woodhill rise from $1,400 in 2022 to more than $17,000 in January 2023.
A spokesman for the Insurance Council of Australia said insurers were using a wide range of data sets, not just municipal flood maps, to attribute premiums.
Asked if changes to the flood maps were expected, a council spokesman said it would be inappropriate to pre-judge the investigator’s findings.
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