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A quiet data audit has exposed how thousands of duplicate property images are inflating planning and asset registers across the region — and what it costs ratepayers to fix them.
Central Coast Council is sitting on a digital records problem it can measure but has been slow to resolve. An internal audit of the council's property and asset image libraries — spanning infrastructure records from Gosford CBD to the northern reaches of Wyong — has identified a significant volume of duplicate image files clogging planning databases, with some asset categories showing duplication rates estimated at more than 30 per cent across active file sets.
The timing matters. Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in 2022 after one of the most damaging financial collapses in NSW local government history. Rebuilding data integrity is not a cosmetic exercise — it directly affects the accuracy of asset valuations, development assessment workflows, and the flood resilience mapping that underpins long-term infrastructure planning across a region that stretches 181,000 hectares and serves roughly 345,000 residents.
Duplicate image records are not simply a storage inconvenience. When the same drainage culvert on Karalta Road in Erina appears under three separate asset IDs with conflicting condition ratings, field crews can be dispatched to sites already assessed, and maintenance budgets are allocated against phantom backlogs. Council's asset management team has been working through a remediation program tied to the broader Digital Transformation Strategy adopted in late 2023, but the image deduplication component has moved more slowly than other workstreams.
Cloud storage costs for local government in NSW average approximately $0.023 per gigabyte per month under whole-of-government procurement arrangements through the NSW Government's cloud purchasing framework. For a council managing tens of thousands of georeferenced site photographs — many captured during the post-administration infrastructure audit between 2021 and 2023 — redundant files across even 10 terabytes of imagery translate to measurable ongoing expenditure, compounded by the staff time required to manually reconcile conflicting records before any development application on the Gosford waterfront or along the Mann Street precinct can be processed efficiently.
The council's geographic information systems team, based at the Gosford administration centre on Hely Street, has flagged the issue in internal working documents as part of the broader GIS data quality project. The Central Coast Local Planning Panel, which assesses regionally significant development applications, depends on accurate site imagery when evaluating proposals in sensitive corridors including the Brisbane Water area and around Tuggerah Lake.
The duplication problem did not emerge overnight. During the administration period, multiple contractors and council teams were capturing asset imagery under different file naming conventions and uploading to parallel systems. When those systems were consolidated after 2022, the merge process generated thousands of near-identical files without a systematic deduplication pass. Council's IT department has since implemented checksum-based matching tools that can identify byte-for-byte duplicates automatically, but visually similar images of the same site taken minutes apart — a common occurrence in condition assessment photography — require a more resource-intensive review process.
The NSW Office of Local Government, which oversees council performance standards under the Local Government Act 1993, includes data management capability in its Integrated Planning and Reporting framework. Councils are expected to demonstrate that asset data underpinning their long-term financial plans is accurate and auditable. For Central Coast, where the asset base includes more than 3,800 kilometres of road network and significant stormwater infrastructure across both the former Gosford City and Wyong Shire areas, the integrity of supporting imagery records has direct bearing on depreciation modelling and renewal forecasting.
Ratepayers seeking to understand where this work sits in council's current priorities can track progress through the council's publicly available Operational Plan quarterly reports, published on the Central Coast Council website. The next progress report covering the April-to-June 2026 quarter is due for presentation to the full council meeting scheduled for late July at the Gosford Council Chambers on Mann Street. Residents with concerns about specific planning records — particularly those involving development sites in the Gosford CBD renewal corridor or flood-affected areas near Tuggerah and Toukley — can lodge a formal information request under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 to obtain the image records associated with their property assessment files.
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Published by The Daily Central Coast