How Central Coast Council's Property Records Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and Why It Took Years to Surface

Central Coast Council's asset management database contains thousands of duplicate property and infrastructure images — some files appearing as many as a dozen times — a problem that administrators and technology staff have traced back to a chaotic period of digitisation carried out between 2018 and 2021, when the organisation was lurching from one financial emergency to the next.

The issue matters now because Council is mid-way through a multi-million dollar push to modernise its geographic information systems ahead of the Gosford CBD renewal program, and duplicate imagery is slowing assessments of drainage infrastructure, road condition and heritage overlays. Contractors working on the Mann Street precinct upgrade and the Leagues Club Field redevelopment have flagged the problem to Council project managers in recent months, according to public meeting agendas tabled at Gosford this year.

Where the Problem Started

The story begins well before the 2020 financial crisis that placed Central Coast Council under state-government-appointed administration. When the two legacy councils — Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council — merged in May 2016 under the NSW Government's council amalgamation program, they brought with them incompatible records systems, different file-naming conventions and, critically, different contractors managing aerial photography and field-inspection imagery.

Gosford's spatial records sat inside a Pathway-based system. Wyong's were stored in a separate Civica environment. The merged entity never completed a clean migration before financial pressure hit. By late 2020, when the NSW Government appointed administrator Rik Hart, Council had run an unlawful $89 million transfer between restricted and unrestricted funds — a figure confirmed in the NSW Government's own review — and the records technology team had been reduced through a hiring freeze. Digitisation of paper-era field photos from Wyong's former water and drainage inspections was handed to a short-term contracted team working remotely, with no deduplication protocol in place.

The result was predictable. Images captured by drone over Narara Creek corridor in 2019, for instance, were ingested twice: once under the legacy Wyong asset ID and again under the merged Council's new identifier. Similar duplication occurred across drainage assets in Tuggerah, culverts along Wyong Road and stormwater infrastructure in the Warnervale growth corridor.

The Cleanup and What It Means for Locals

Council returned to elected representation in December 2022, and by mid-2023 the new administration had commissioned an internal audit of its spatial data holdings. That audit, referenced in a publicly available Council business paper from October 2023, found the duplication rate across infrastructure image records was running above 30 percent in some asset categories.

The practical consequences are not abstract. Flood resilience planning for low-lying suburbs including Toukley and Budgewoi relies partly on accurate, timestamped imagery of drainage culverts. If a planner queries an asset and retrieves a duplicate image filed under a different date, the system may report a recent inspection when the last genuine site visit was years earlier. Climate planning across the Tuggerah Lakes foreshore — already under pressure from the kind of record-breaking winter warming that has dominated statewide weather conversation this July — depends on imagery integrity.

Council has engaged its geographic information systems panel contractor to run automated hash-matching across the database, a process expected to take through to the end of the 2026 calendar year. The work is being funded from within the existing information technology capital budget, which Council set at approximately $4.2 million for the 2025–26 financial year in its Long Term Financial Plan documents.

Residents and community groups with submissions pending on infrastructure near the Gosford waterfront or the Woy Woy peninsula should ask Council officers directly whether spatial imagery supporting their assessment has been verified as deduplicated. Council's customer service centre on Mann Street in Gosford can direct those inquiries to the assets and infrastructure directorate. The duplicate image replacement project is scheduled for a progress report to the full Council in November 2026.