Highlands unveils 'Invest in Highlands' microsite and 4Runner floodplain tools to help investors and residents

The Borough of Highlands presented a new Invest in Highlands microsite and demonstrated the 4Runner floodplain management platform to the council on July 16, 2025. The presenter, Kathleen Shaw, described the pages as a concise, investor-facing entry point into the town’s larger redevelopment and floodplain compliance materials.

Shaw said the microsite consolidates design guidelines, the Bay Avenue redevelopment plan and a list of roughly 151 parcels identified as redevelopment opportunities, plus conceptual renderings and development parameters (she cited an illustrative 15,000-square-foot concept on three Bay Avenue lots). "It's called Invest Highlands... I like to think of it as the cliffnotes," Shaw said, describing the site as a way to give potential investors quick access to the plan and links to apply through borough permitting.

The 4Runner tool was presented as an operational platform for residents, surveyors and staff. Shaw demonstrated map layers (zoning, steep slopes, wetlands, utilities), a measurement tool tied to parcel addresses and a centralized FAQ/elevation-certificate workflow. She said the system supports internal routing and task management for floodplain development permits, can export reports for compliance tracking, and has been used widely enough to serve as a pilot site for other municipalities. On CRS (Community Rating System) relevance, Shaw said: "Everything we do impacts our ability to get the rating." She added that while new CRS credits were not being issued at the moment, organizing data and workflows strengthens the borough’s position when opportunities open.

Council members asked practical questions about insurer and lender access to data, data portability in the event a vendor fails, and planned feature rollouts. Shaw said the platform is cloud-hosted, that data exports and a data-dump agreement exist, and that future enhancements will include task management and improved reporting to support permit review cycles. She also noted a floodplain mitigation assistance grant had been submitted in partnership with the state; the transcript records the grant submission as pending state review.

Shaw described steps to integrate county and state elevation-certificate records to clear older files from the national violation tracker and to produce exportable compliance reports for properties in active elevation or mitigation tracks. She and colleagues plan to present the layered implementation at an October conference for floodplain managers.

Council approved putting the Invest in Highlands/4Runner links where they are easy to find and discussed mirroring the business-partnership page content on the borough business page to ensure consistent, concise presentation for investors and residents.