Central Coast Struggles With Duplicate Images in Planning Portals

Central Coast Council is sitting on a backlog of duplicated, outdated and mismatched property images across its digital asset registers — a problem that has quietly grown since the organisation emerged from state administration in 2021 and began consolidating the legacy databases of the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council. The duplication issue now affects planning portal records, heritage registers and the council's publicly accessible development application tracking system.

The timing matters. NSW councils are under pressure from the state government to digitise and standardise property data ahead of housing reforms tied to the Minns government's planning agenda. Accurate imagery underpins development approvals, flood overlay mapping and infrastructure planning — all of which are acutely sensitive on the Central Coast, where climate resilience investment has accelerated following repeated flood events across the Tuggerah Lakes catchment and the Wyong River corridor.

A Legacy Data Problem With Real Planning Consequences

The root cause is structural. When the two former councils merged under the 2016 amalgamation, they brought with them incompatible document management systems. The subsequent administration period, which ran from 2020 to 2021, froze much of the data remediation work. Staff at the council's Gosford administration centre on Mann Street have been working through the cleanup since, but sources familiar with the process — without being identified due to the sensitivity of internal operations — suggest the task is larger than initially scoped.

The practical impact shows up in the council's ePathway development application portal, where duplicate site photographs and inconsistent cadastral imagery can delay assessments. The Gosford CBD renewal precinct, centred on the blocks around Donnison Street and Georgiana Terrace, has been particularly affected given the volume of development applications lodged in recent years as private developers respond to rezoning incentives.

Globally, this is not a unique problem, but the responses vary sharply. The City of Amsterdam completed a full audit of its BAG (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen) imagery database in 2023, deploying AI-assisted deduplication tools across roughly 900,000 address records. Auckland Council in New Zealand completed a comparable exercise as part of its post-amalgamation data consolidation — that council merged eight predecessor bodies in 2010 and spent several years standardising its GIS property layers. Bristol City Council in the UK tied its image remediation directly to its digital planning service overhaul under the Planning Data Programme, a UK government-funded initiative.

Where Central Coast Sits in That Company

Against those comparators, Central Coast is at an earlier stage. The council has not publicly released a completion timeline or budget for its image remediation work, and no dedicated program equivalent to Bristol's has been announced. What the council has done is join the NSW Spatial Digital Twin project, a state government initiative that provides a standardised 3D data environment for councils and aims to reduce the kind of siloed, inconsistent imagery that drives duplication in the first place. That platform has been progressively expanded since its launch in 2020.

The Gosford waterfront redevelopment area — including parcels along Kibble Park and the foreshore between Mann Street and the Broadwater — is understood to be among the priority zones for accurate imagery given the volume of concurrent planning overlays: flood mapping, heritage buffers and active development applications all compete in the same spatial records.

For residents and developers, the most immediate practical advice is to cross-check any site imagery in the council's online DA portal against the NSW Valuer General's land information records, which are updated on a separate cycle and can flag discrepancies. Central Coast Council's spatial services team can also be contacted through the Mann Street service centre to request a formal review of a specific property's digital record ahead of lodging a development application.

The broader picture is that cities which invested early in post-amalgamation data hygiene — Auckland, Amsterdam — are now reaping dividends in faster planning approvals and fewer appeal delays. Central Coast's path to that outcome depends on how quickly it can move from patch-and-fix to a properly resourced remediation program. That decision sits with elected councillors who returned to office in late 2021 after the administration period ended.