Good fences make good neighbours: council seeks to shore up boundary technicality

The borders, as they are explicitly drawn around the areas of Jimmy's Beach in the north of Port Stephens, which neighbour the MidCoast Council, and at Raymond Terrace on the Maitland Council boundary, hug the banks of the water separating the neighbours rather than dividing the LGAs in the centre of the bay to the north and the Hunter River to the south-west.

It's a minor technicality barely a few metres in some places. Still, Port Stephens councillor Giacomo Arnott says that the boundaries have meant that councils have traditionally relied on the goodwill of their neighbours when it comes to managing the banks of the water bodies.

In the north, while MidCoast council has generally taken responsibility for the management of Jimmys Beach, which has been plagued by erosion for years, the placement of the LGA boundaries between it and Port Stephens on the extremities of the banks could raise an uncertain technical argument over whether the beach is in fact in the Port Stephens LGA. Meanwhile, the Hunter River border, which Port Stephens has traditionally managed, could similarly be argued to belong to Maitland.

During Tuesday's meeting, Cr Arnott is expected to move that his council speak with its neighbours to consider redrawing the boundaries through the centre of the Hunter River and the Karuah River, which feeds out through Port Stephens Bay, to effectively shore up the technicality and formalise the collective councils' responsibilities for managing their waterways.

Cr Arnott will ask his council to "agree that its preference is for the LGA boundary in a body of water to be in the middle" of the body "to ensure each council is responsible for its own shoreline" and that Port Stephens' general manager will consult with neighbouring councils for a joint submission to the state's LGA boundary office to redraw select borders.

The council expects that the technicality will have no impact on ratepayers in its own or neighbouring councils. Cr Arnott's motion is to consult with surrounding councils about the proposal initially, but shifting the boundaries would formalise the relationships and agreements already in place, he said.

In 2019, the MidCoast Council spent $4 million on a two-kilometre sand transfer pipeline to replenish Jimmys Beach, which it said at the time was a longer-term and more cost-effective solution to the area's long-running erosion issues. It had previously spent roughly $600,000 a year trucking sand to create a buffer along The Boulevarde, a strip of waterfront properties where a number of homes had come under threat in 2014 when large swells tore away sections of the road.