News · Council · Port Stephens
Raymond Terrace is writing its first new plan in a decade, and it has dropped Heatherbrae from it
Port Stephens Council is preparing a Raymond Terrace Place Plan, a roadmap for the next 15 to 20 years that replaces the 2015 Raymond Terrace and Heatherbrae Strategy. Early engagement has closed. The headline is the town planning its future; the structural decision inside it is that Heatherbrae is no longer part of the same document.
The council describes a place plan as starting from community values and priorities to identify what makes an area unique, producing an action-focused plan with a vision and the steps to reach it. For Raymond Terrace it is to guide “how the town grows and improves”, focused on a “safe, vibrant and connected riverside centre” that supports new housing and investment and delivers better public spaces.
Its reason for starting now is a list of things that have changed since 2015: major infrastructure investment, housing reforms, and shifting community priorities. That first item is not abstract here. The M1 extension to Raymond Terrace is the largest infrastructure change the town has seen in a generation, and a town that a highway now passes by rather than through has a different future to plan for than one that does not.
The Heatherbrae decision
The 2015 document was the Raymond Terrace and Heatherbrae Strategy. The new one is not. The council’s stated reason: “Heatherbrae is a unique centre with a different role to Raymond Terrace. For this reason, it requires a tailored planning approach rather than being included in the Raymond Terrace Place Plan.”
Our view, labelled as such: that is a defensible planning judgement and a consequential one. Raymond Terrace is a residential town with a riverside commercial centre; Heatherbrae is the industrial and bulky-goods area on the highway side. Planning them together in 2015 meant one document balancing a town centre against a freight and industrial precinct, which is genuinely awkward. Planning them apart means each gets a document suited to it, and it also means the interface between them, which is where traffic, employment and land-use pressure actually meet, sits in neither plan by default. The council says Heatherbrae will get its own approach. When that arrives is the thing to watch.
What the town centre legally is
The council sets out the Raymond Terrace Town Centre in planning terms, which is worth recording because it determines what can be built there. It covers land zoned E2 Commercial Centre, where shops, cafes, offices, community facilities and apartments are encouraged, and E3 Productivity Support, where business, bulky goods retail and service industrial operate.
Apartments being encouraged in E2 matters, because the plan is explicitly about where new housing should go, and one of the questions the council put to residents was blunt: Do you support higher-density housing?
What was asked
Early engagement covered five themes, and the questions are specific enough to be worth listing rather than summarising:
- Economy and investment - what should happen on key Council-owned sites, what businesses and services residents want, how to attract investment while keeping local character.
- Housing - what types are needed, where new housing should go, what good development looks like, and whether residents support higher density.
- Environment and heritage - what natural features to protect, how to better connect the town centre to the river, where more trees and green space are needed.
- Community wellbeing - what would help people feel safer, which places they avoid and why, what facilities are missing, and what one thing to prioritise in the next five years.
- Movement - what makes it easy or hard to get around, gaps in walking and cycling connections, what would encourage more walking and cycling.
Two of those questions are unusually direct for a council consultation. Asking which places people avoid, and why they feel unsafe, invites answers a council then has to do something with. So does asking outright about higher density rather than burying it in a preference scale.
What happens next
Early engagement has closed and the council says it had a strong response, with the feedback published on the project page. The plan itself is not published, so the test is the ordinary one for this kind of process: whether the document that emerges can be traced back to what people said, and whether the actions in it carry dates.
How we sourced this
The Place Plan, its 15 to 20 year horizon, its replacement of the 2015 Raymond Terrace and Heatherbrae Strategy, the stated reasons for starting now, the definition of a place plan, the Heatherbrae exclusion and the council’s quoted reason for it, the E2 and E3 zoning description of the town centre, the five engagement themes and their questions, and the statement that early engagement has closed are from Port Stephens Council’s Raymond Terrace Place Plan project page on its Have Your Say platform, read on 31 July 2026.
We have not read the community responses. The page says they are published and invites readers to scroll to them, but they load into the page dynamically and were not retrieved, so nothing here characterises what residents actually said. Neither the draft Place Plan nor the 2015 strategy has been read; the comparison between them is the council’s own account. The paragraph beginning “Our view”, and the description of Heatherbrae as the industrial and bulky-goods area, are ours.
Sources
- Port Stephens Council, Raymond Terrace Place Plan (Have Your Say project page, read 31 July 2026): the plan's purpose and 15 to 20 year horizon, the replacement of the 2015 Raymond Terrace and Heatherbrae Strategy and the stated reasons, the definition of a place plan, the Heatherbrae exclusion and its quoted justification, the E2 Commercial Centre and E3 Productivity Support zoning of the town centre, the five engagement themes and their questions, and the closure of early engagement.
- The Hunter Ledger, the M1 extension to Raymond Terrace: our earlier reporting on the infrastructure change the council cites.
Spotted an error, or took part in this engagement? Tell us and we will check it against the sources and log the outcome here.