How Central Coast Council's Property Records Ended Up With Duplicate Images — and Why It's Taken Years to Fix

Central Coast Council is working through a data remediation project to correct duplicate and mismatched images embedded in its property and asset management records — a problem that traces its roots directly to the financial crisis that sent the council into administration in October 2020.

The duplication issue matters now because council is simultaneously pushing forward with Gosford CBD renewal projects, updating flood mapping under its coastal management program, and responding to community pressure over housing approvals along the Woy Woy Peninsula and at Wyong town centre. Accurate asset records underpin all of it. When a photograph of a stormwater culvert on Dane Drive is tagged against a drainage easement at Tuggerah, or a shot of a footpath on Mann Street appears twice in unrelated development application files, the downstream errors compound quickly.

How the Backlog Built Up

The story starts well before administration. The 2016 amalgamation that merged Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council into a single entity created an immediate records management headache. Two separate geographic information systems, two asset registers, and two sets of digital photo libraries were merged under time pressure, with staff from both legacy councils uploading images to a shared platform that had not been fully configured for deduplication.

By 2019, internal reports — referenced in documents tabled at council meetings that year — flagged that the asset management system held a significant volume of duplicate file entries, particularly in the roads and drainage categories. No remediation program was funded before the council's cash crisis hit. When administrator Rik Hart took over in October 2020, operational priorities shifted sharply toward financial stabilisation. The image-cataloguing issue sat in a queue.

The 2016 amalgamation is directly relevant: the NSW Government set a tight implementation timeline, and technology integration received far less resourcing than the headline merger tasks of combining payroll systems and harmonising rating categories. Staff at the former Wyong office on Pacific Highway and the Gosford administration building on Mann Street were effectively running parallel workflows for longer than planned.

What the Remediation Actually Involves

The current project, which council confirmed was underway in its 2025-26 operational budget cycle, involves manually reviewing asset image records across the roads, drainage, and open space portfolios. The work is being carried out by council's own GIS and asset management teams, with some contracted data-services support. The process cross-references GPS metadata embedded in photographs against the spatial coordinates of the asset they are supposed to document, then flags cases where the same image hash appears more than once across different asset IDs.

This is not a trivial exercise. Central Coast Council manages infrastructure across a local government area covering roughly 1,681 square kilometres — from the Hawkesbury River in the south to Lake Macquarie in the north. The sheer geographic spread means images taken at, say, Shelly Beach Road in Gosford and at The Entrance Road near Long Jetty can share similar visual characteristics — grey pavement, kerb and gutter, road shoulder — making automated flagging alone unreliable.

The broader context of Sydney's record-breaking winter heat, confirmed by the Bureau of Meteorology as the hottest June since 1859, has also sharpened focus on the council's flood and climate resilience mapping. Accurate photographic records of drainage infrastructure are a direct input into those assessments. Getting the asset image library right is, in that sense, no longer just a housekeeping matter.

Council's integrated planning documents, available on its website, list asset data quality as a key performance indicator under its 2022-32 Community Strategic Plan. The remediation work is expected to continue through the current financial year ending June 30, 2027, with a formal progress report scheduled to go before the elected council in the first quarter of 2027. Residents with concerns about specific assets — or who have noticed outdated or clearly incorrect photographs attached to development application files visible on the council's public DA tracker — can lodge a report through the council's online service request portal or by calling the Gosford or Wyong customer service centres directly.