Central Coast Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Hitting Its Digital Records This Week

Central Coast Council confirmed this week that an internal audit of its digital records management system identified more than 400 duplicate image files embedded across planning, infrastructure, and community services databases — a problem that staff say has been compounding since the council emerged from state administration in 2022. The cleanup, now underway, is the first structured attempt to standardise the council's image library since its IT systems were partially merged following the 2016 amalgamation of Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council.

The timing matters. Council is mid-way through the Gosford CBD renewal program, and planning officers are processing a high volume of development applications tied to new residential towers along Mann Street and the Kibble Park precinct. Duplicate or mislabelled site photographs in those files can delay assessment timelines, according to council's published service standard guidelines, which set a 40-business-day target for most Class 1 development applications.

What the Audit Found and Where the Problems Sit

The duplicates are concentrated in three areas: flood mapping imagery from the Tuggerah Lakes foreshore, street-level condition photographs from the Wyong Road corridor between Tuggerah and Kanwal, and heritage documentation images linked to properties in the East Gosford and Erina areas. Council's records management team — operating out of the Gosford administration building on Hely Street — flagged the issue after a migration project to the state government's GovDCM platform revealed that file-naming conventions differed significantly between legacy Gosford and legacy Wyong datasets.

The practical effect is not trivial. When a planning officer pulls site history for a Mann Street address, they may retrieve the same photograph filed under three or four different reference codes, inflating apparent record counts and requiring manual cross-checking. For flood resilience work around Tuggerah Lakes — already a pressure point given the broader climate picture across the NSW coast this winter — having clean, correctly indexed imagery is directly relevant to modelling accuracy.

Central Coast Council's current Digital Strategy, adopted in March 2024, committed $2.1 million over three years to modernising records infrastructure. The duplicate image audit falls under that program's second-year deliverables. Council has not publicly stated whether the cleanup will cost additional funds beyond that allocation or whether it will require contractor support.

What Residents and Applicants Should Expect

Anyone with a live development application lodged through the NSW Planning Portal that involves a Central Coast address should be aware that council has advised its customer service team — reachable through the Wyong and Gosford service centres — that some file requests may take slightly longer than usual through July while the remediation runs. Council's online DA tracker, accessible via its website, remains the most reliable way to monitor application status without relying on staff callbacks.

The Gosford CBD specifically has 14 active development applications currently in the system at various assessment stages, based on the publicly accessible NSW Planning Portal register as of this week. Several involve multi-storey residential proposals near the Gosford train station precinct on Donnison Street, where accurate site photography is part of the heritage and urban design assessment process.

Council is expected to report progress on the duplicate removal project to its next ordinary meeting, scheduled for late July at the Gosford Council Chambers. The records management team has indicated the bulk of the automated deduplication process should be complete by the end of July, with manual verification of heritage and flood imagery taking longer — potentially into September. Residents with concerns about how their specific applications are affected can contact council's development assessment team directly through the service request portal on council's website.