News
A slow-burning administrative problem inside the council's development application system has exposed deeper questions about document management during and after the administration era.
Central Coast Council's online planning portal is sitting on thousands of duplicate image files — scanned site photos, architectural elevations, and flood-overlay maps uploaded multiple times across hundreds of development applications — and the problem did not happen overnight. It built up across at least four years of system migrations, staff turnover, and two separate software transitions that followed the council's near-collapse in 2020.
The duplication issue matters now because the council is in the middle of a $30 million digital transformation program tied to its broader recovery obligations. Ratepayers and development industry practitioners are being asked to trust a digital-first lodgement system at exactly the moment that system is carrying substantial legacy clutter from the administration period, when financial controls and IT governance were stretched thin.
The story starts in October 2020, when the NSW Government appointed administrators to run Central Coast Council after the organisation ran out of money — an event that triggered significant upheaval across every directorate, including the planning and environment team based at the Gosford administration building on Mann Street. Staff numbers dropped. Contractors filled gaps. Institutional knowledge walked out the door alongside redundancies.
Between late 2020 and mid-2022, the council was simultaneously managing a backlog of development applications, including proposals along the Terrigal Drive corridor in Terrigal and several medium-density projects near Wyong town centre, while trying to migrate records from its legacy Civica Authority system to a newer cloud-based environment. That migration, according to council documents tabled during the 2023 recovery audit period, was not completed under a single supervised data-cleansing process. Attachments — particularly image files — were carried across in batches, and in several instances entire document folders were uploaded more than once.
By the time elected councillors returned to office in December 2022, the portal had already accumulated the duplication problem. No single handover document flagged it as a priority. The NSW Office of Local Government's oversight during the administration period focused primarily on financial controls and service continuity rather than IT asset integrity.
Duplicate images are not merely a housekeeping embarrassment. Each file consumes cloud storage that the council pays for on a per-gigabyte basis. More practically, planning officers searching for site photos within the council's internal system — which connects to the public-facing portal — can pull the wrong version of an image if duplicates are not clearly dated or labelled. On a site like the Gosford waterfront precinct, where development proposals have evolved through multiple amendment rounds since 2018, having three or four near-identical aerial photographs attached to a single DA with different upload timestamps creates genuine ambiguity about which image reflects current conditions.
The council's IT services team flagged the scale of the problem internally in February 2026, according to agenda papers from the March 2026 ordinary council meeting published on the council's website. Those papers noted that a preliminary audit of one planning system module identified more than 14,000 files requiring review, though the council has not publicly confirmed how many of those are confirmed duplicates.
Industry participants who regularly lodge DAs through the council — including consultants working on projects in Erina and the Woy Woy peninsula — have raised informal concerns at pre-lodgement meetings about inconsistent document retrieval, though no formal complaints mechanism specific to this issue has been publicised.
The council's current Digital Transformation Roadmap, adopted in 2024, sets a target of having all planning system records verified and rationalised before the planned upgrade to a new integrated development assessment platform, which is scheduled for staged rollout from the third quarter of 2026. That timeline is now tight. Council staff will need to complete the image audit, remove verified duplicates, and establish a file-naming protocol before the new platform goes live — otherwise the same unstructured data simply migrates again into a shinier environment.
Ratepayers and applicants can check the status of specific DAs, including attached documents, through the council's public portal at any time. Anyone who believes an incorrect or outdated image is attached to an active application on a site they have an interest in can formally request a document correction through the planning directorate's customer service team at the Gosford office on Mann Street.
Spread the word
About this article
Published by The Daily Central Coast