By the Numbers: The Hidden Cost of Duplicate Images Flooding Central Coast Council's Digital Records

Central Coast Council is sitting on thousands of duplicate image files spread across its planning and infrastructure document systems — a problem that has ballooned since the organisation emerged from state administration in 2021 and began rapidly digitising its backlog of physical records. The scale of the duplication, confirmed through a review of the council's digital asset management framework, points to a systemic gap that is costing real money and delaying public access to key planning documents.

The timing matters. Council is currently processing an unprecedented volume of development applications tied to the Gosford CBD Urban Renewal Corridor, which stretches along Mann Street and Donnison Street toward the waterfront precinct. Every DA lodged through the NSW Planning Portal generates multiple image attachments — site plans, elevation drawings, heritage impact statements — and without automated deduplication tools in place, the same file routinely lands in the system two, three, or more times under different file names.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Industry benchmarks from digital records management bodies suggest that unmanaged local government document repositories typically carry a duplicate rate of between 20 and 35 percent of total stored image files. For a council the size of Central Coast — which serves a population of roughly 345,000 people across more than 180,000 properties — that translates to a significant and measurable drag on cloud storage costs. Commercial cloud storage for local government in NSW is generally priced per gigabyte per month, and duplicate-heavy repositories routinely inflate storage bills by 15 to 25 percent above what would otherwise be required.

Central Coast Council's digital transformation program, which kicked off formally in the 2022–23 financial year as part of the post-administration recovery plan, set a target of migrating all legacy paper-based planning records to digital formats by June 2025. That deadline passed without full completion, according to publicly available council business papers from late 2025, meaning the backlog — and its associated duplication problems — has continued to accumulate.

The Wyong offices on Hely Street and the Gosford administration building on Watt Street both maintain separate document intake workflows that were never fully unified after the former Gosford City Council and former Wyong Shire Council merged in 2016. That structural split created two parallel naming conventions for image files, which is one of the primary reasons duplicates are so hard to catch automatically — the same scan of the same document may carry entirely different metadata depending on which office originally processed it.

Practical Fixes and What Comes Next

The council's Information and Communications Technology directorate flagged the deduplication issue as a priority in its 2025–26 operational plan, with a review of image asset management tools scheduled for the third quarter of the financial year — meaning a recommendation to councillors was expected by March 2026. Whether that review produced a procurement decision has not yet been confirmed in public-facing council minutes.

For residents and developers trying to access planning documents through the Gosford Spatial Viewer or the council's online DA tracking portal, duplicate files create a practical frustration: search results return multiple versions of the same drawing, with no clear indication of which is the most current. On a busy corridor like Kibble Park and the surrounding Gosford foreshore redevelopment zone, where more than 40 active DAs were listed on the portal as of late June 2026, that confusion compounds quickly.

The fix is not technically complex. Deduplication software can cross-reference file hash values regardless of filename, flagging identical image files for consolidation. The cost of commercial tools capable of handling a repository of the size held by Central Coast Council typically falls in the range of $30,000 to $80,000 for initial licensing, with annual maintenance well below that. Against the ongoing storage and staff-time costs of managing a bloated system, that expenditure pays for itself within a single financial year — provided the council commits to a unified file naming standard across both the Gosford and Wyong intake streams from the point of implementation forward.

Residents wanting to monitor progress can track council ICT reports through the official Central Coast Council meeting agendas, published at least three days before each ordinary council meeting on the council's website under the Document Library section.