How the Central Coast Is Tackling Duplicate Image Sprawl — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Worldwide

Central Coast Council is quietly fighting a war on digital clutter. Following its 2020 financial administration — one of the most significant local government failures in NSW history — the council inherited a fractured IT environment riddled with duplicated imagery, redundant files, and overlapping databases accumulated across years of mismanaged mergers. Cleaning that up has become a low-profile but costly priority in 2026.

Duplicate image replacement — the process of auditing, consolidating, and replacing redundant digital assets across public-facing platforms, planning portals, and internal systems — sounds unglamorous. But for a council still rebuilding public trust after administrator Dick Persson handed back control in late 2021, getting the basics right matters enormously. Every garbled planning map on the Gosford Development Hub portal, every broken image link in the Terrigal foreshore master plan documents, chips away at credibility the organisation can't afford to lose.

What Other Cities Are Doing

The problem isn't unique to the Central Coast. Newcastle City Council in the UK launched a formal digital asset management overhaul in 2023, consolidating roughly 340,000 redundant files across its planning and community services departments. Christchurch City Council in New Zealand, rebuilding its own civic infrastructure after the 2011 earthquake, adopted a centralised digital asset management platform by 2022 that reduced duplicate imagery in public-facing planning documents by an estimated 60 percent within 18 months, according to council published figures. Adelaide City Council's Smart City team flagged duplicate geospatial imagery as a specific cost driver in its 2024–25 digital transformation review.

The common thread in cities that handled this well: they treated it as infrastructure spending, not housekeeping. Christchurch tied its asset management program to a single source-of-truth geographic information system, meaning planning officers, comms teams, and public portals all drew from one verified image library. Newcastle ring-fenced a dedicated budget line — roughly £180,000 over two years — rather than absorbing the work into existing IT contracts.

The Local Picture

On the Central Coast, the pressure is sharpest in the Gosford CBD renewal corridor, where planning documents, developer prospectuses, and council strategic communications have proliferated rapidly since the Gosford City Centre Master Plan was revived post-administration. The Gosford Waterfront precinct, the proposed Mann Street revitalisation zone, and the Leagues Club Field redevelopment all generate significant volumes of mapping data, render imagery, and planning photography — much of it stored, duplicated, and occasionally contradicted across multiple council departments.

Central Coast Council's current Digital Strategy, adopted in 2023, nominates digital asset rationalisation as a workstream under its broader IT modernisation program, which is tied to a $4.2 million technology uplift budget approved for the 2025–26 financial year. Whether image deduplication is receiving a meaningful share of that allocation is not clear from publicly available budget documents. The council's planning portal, accessible via its Gosford and Wyong service hubs, still surfaces conflicting aerial imagery in some development application search results — a persistent frustration flagged by local planning consultants working in the Terrigal and Erina precincts.

Housing pressure adds urgency. The Central Coast absorbed significant population growth from Sydney in the post-pandemic years, and development application volumes have remained elevated through 2025 and into 2026. Every week a planning officer spends reconciling duplicate site images or re-uploading corrected maps is a week of processing time lost in a system already under strain. The council's DA processing times have been a recurring topic at community forums held at the Gosford Regional Library on Donnison Street.

The practical lesson from Christchurch and Newcastle is that the fix is achievable but requires deliberate investment rather than organic tidying. Cities that waited for the problem to resolve itself found the duplication compounded as new platforms were added on top of old ones. For Central Coast Council, the window to embed good digital asset hygiene into its ongoing rebuild — before another layer of systems gets bolted on — is now. Residents and developers wanting to track progress can monitor council's Digital Strategy reporting, tabled at ordinary council meetings held at the Central Coast Administration Building on Mann Street, Gosford.