How the Central Coast Is Tackling Duplicate Digital Records — and Where It Lags Behind Global Peers

Central Coast Council is sitting on a backlog of duplicate cadastral and aerial images inside its property and planning databases — a legacy of the 2020 financial administration that left IT systems patchy and, in some cases, running parallel records for the same land parcels. The problem is not unique to Gosford, but the pace of fixing it is starting to look slow compared with what comparable mid-sized councils have managed elsewhere.

The timing matters. NSW Planning Reform is pushing councils toward mandatory digital lodgement under the state's ePlanning portal, with compliance benchmarks tightening progressively through 2026 and into 2027. Duplicate imagery inside a council's geographic information system — old aerial shots layered over updated captures, or the same block appearing twice under different lot references — can trigger errors in development application assessments, flood overlay mapping and heritage registers. On a coastline already stress-testing its climate resilience plans, a bad overlay can mean the wrong flood category applied to a Tuggerah Lakes-adjacent block, or a heritage curtilage drawn incorrectly around a Mann Street building in the Gosford CBD.

What Other Cities Have Done

Newcastle City Council, roughly 90 kilometres north, completed a GIS deduplication project in mid-2024 after contracting Spatial Vision, a Melbourne-based geospatial consultancy. The project consolidated aerial image libraries dating back to 2009 and reduced its active layer count by roughly 40 percent, according to documentation published on the council's open-data portal. Christchurch City Council in New Zealand — a useful comparison given its own post-disaster administrative rebuild following the 2011 earthquakes — stood up a full spatial data audit in 2022 and mandated a single authoritative image source for all planning decisions by January 2023. Bristol City Council in the UK went further, integrating its duplicate-image resolution into a broader cloud migration to Microsoft Azure, completing the transition in late 2023.

Central Coast Council, still rebuilding governance capacity after the administrator period that ended in December 2021, has not publicly released a comparable program. The council's current ICT strategy, adopted in 2023, references data integrity as a priority area but does not specify a timeline or budget allocation for GIS image deduplication specifically. The Coast's planning team operates out of the Gosford office on Mann Street and a secondary service point at Wyong, and staff across both locations can encounter different base-imagery versions when pulling up the same property file.

What This Means for Residents and Developers

For anyone lodging a development application near Wamberal, The Entrance or around the Long Jetty foreshore — all areas with active coastal hazard overlays — the quality of the council's underlying spatial imagery is not an abstract IT question. A duplicate or outdated aerial layer can place a structure inside a coastal erosion zone it no longer occupies, or miss a vegetation buffer that post-dates the image. The Central Coast Regional Plan 2041, which guides all major land-use decisions, relies on accurate spatial data to apply its environmental protection zones correctly.

The state government's Investment in Regions program has directed funds toward council digital uplift broadly, but specific GIS remediation grants require councils to submit detailed project scopes. Hunter councils, including Maitland and Lake Macquarie, have accessed this funding stream. Whether Central Coast Council has lodged or is preparing a comparable application is not confirmed in publicly available budget papers.

For residents and developers, the practical advice is straightforward: if you are lodging a DA or seeking a planning certificate for land near a flood plain, a heritage area or the Gosford CBD renewal corridor, request confirmation from council staff of which aerial imagery vintage is being used in the assessment. The NSW Information Commissioner's office has guidance on accessing GIS datasets held by councils under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009. Pushing for that transparency is, right now, the most reliable check available while the council's own data housekeeping catches up to where its interstate and international peers already sit.