Central Coast Council's Digital Archive Overhaul Hits Milestone as Duplicate Image Purge Clears Thousands of Files

Central Coast Council completed the latest phase of its digital records remediation program this week, with staff confirming that a bulk duplicate-image replacement exercise across the council's development application portal removed more than 4,000 redundant files by Thursday, July 3. The work, carried out through the council's Information Management unit based at the Gosford administration centre on Mann Street, targeted image assets tied to DA lodgements and property records that had accumulated duplicate entries during two separate software migrations between 2021 and 2023.

The timing matters. The council only exited formal financial administration in 2021 after a period of state-government oversight, and it has since been under pressure to modernise its back-end systems as part of a broader effort to rebuild institutional credibility. Sloppy digital records carry practical costs: duplicated images attached to the wrong property folio can delay development approvals, create discrepancies in flood-overlay mapping, and generate errors in the publicly searchable DA tracker that thousands of residents and builders rely on each week.

What the Audit Found on the Coast

The duplicate problem was concentrated in two record categories. First, aerial and site photography linked to properties in the Gosford CBD renewal precinct — particularly parcels along Mann Street, Donnison Street, and the waterfront near Gosford Waterfront Activation Area — had been uploaded multiple times during a 2022 transition to the council's new Objective ECM platform. Second, flood-risk imagery associated with properties in low-lying suburbs including Umina Beach and Woy Woy, which are subject to the council's Coastal Management Program, contained duplicated attachments that inflated file counts and slowed retrieval times for planning officers.

Council staff did not replace images with new material in most cases. Instead, the exercise identified the canonical version of each file, retired duplicates to an offline archive, and re-linked the surviving image to the correct property or DA record. The process used metadata timestamps and file-hash comparisons rather than manual review for the bulk of entries, with manual checks reserved for roughly 300 records flagged as ambiguous.

The work also intersected with the council's obligations under the NSW State Records Act 1998, which requires local government bodies to maintain accurate and retrievable records of all decisions affecting land use. Retaining duplicate images that are incorrectly tagged does not technically breach the Act, but it can complicate compliance audits — a sensitivity the council has been acutely aware of since the administration period ended.

Why It Matters for DA Lodgements and Residents

For anyone lodging a development application through the NSW Planning Portal — the state government's centralised system that feeds into council workflows — image integrity affects how quickly a planner can verify site conditions. Gosford and Wyong offices have both flagged backlogs in DA processing at various points over the past two years. While the duplicate-image issue was not cited as a primary cause of any specific delay, internal records management reviews carried out in early 2026 identified it as a contributing inefficiency in roughly 12 percent of applications reviewed during a sample audit period.

The council's records team is expected to complete a second pass over heritage-listed property imagery — including sites in the historic East Gosford and Wyoming precincts — before the end of July. After that, the focus will shift to standardising image resolution and naming conventions ahead of a planned integration with the NSW Spatial Digital Twin program, which the state government has been rolling out progressively to councils across the state.

Residents and developers who use the council's online DA tracker can check whether their lodgement records are displaying correctly by searching the property address through the Central Coast Council planning portal. Anyone who notices a missing or incorrectly attached image on a current application is advised to contact the council's Customer Service Centre on Mann Street, Gosford, or through the online request system, and to quote their DA reference number directly to speed up any corrections.