Central Coast Council's Digital Asset Overhaul: What Changed This Week in the Duplicate Image Purge

Central Coast Council confirmed this week it had removed more than 14,000 duplicate image files from its public-facing development application portal, a digital housekeeping effort that had been stalled since the council emerged from state administration in 2021. The purge, carried out between Monday June 30 and Thursday July 3, affects how residents search and view property records, heritage documentation and flood-overlay maps across the region.

The timing matters. Council is under mounting pressure to have its digital planning infrastructure ready before a suite of rezoning proposals around Gosford CBD and Wyong town centre go to public exhibition later this year. Duplicate and mislinked images had been causing document-loading failures on the NSW Planning Portal for Central Coast applications — a problem that frustrated submitters and, according to internal IT logs tabled at the June council meeting, contributed to at least 37 incomplete DA submissions between January and May 2026.

What the Clean-Up Actually Involved

The work centred on the council's Content Management System, which stores images attached to DAs, environmental assessments and land-use strategy documents. Over time — partly because of data migration issues when the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council systems were merged in 2016 — the same images had been uploaded multiple times under different file names. Some heritage photographs of Mann Street, Gosford, appeared in the system as many as nine separate times.

Council's digital services team, based at the Gosford Administration Building on Donnison Street, worked with a contracted data specialist to run deduplication software across roughly 280,000 stored files. The process identified and archived the redundant copies rather than deleting them outright, meaning records can be restored if an error is found. The Library of NSW's digital preservation guidelines, which Central Coast Council adopted in March 2025, require that original assets be retained for a minimum of seven years.

For residents using the Erina Fair Service Centre or lodging documents through the council's online portal at home, the practical effect should be faster load times and fewer broken image links when pulling up a DA. Council's own testing on Friday showed page-load times for a typical residential DA document set dropped from an average of 11.4 seconds to under four seconds after the clean-up.

Why It Connects to the Bigger Planning Picture

Central Coast has been working to rebuild its administrative credibility after the 2020 financial crisis that sent the council into state-appointed administration under Rik Hart. Part of that recovery has involved modernising back-end systems that were underfunded for years. The duplicate image problem is a visible symptom of that era — an IT debt that compounded quietly while the organisation was focused on financial survival.

The stakes are higher now because the council's Local Housing Strategy, which targets 30,000 new dwellings across the region by 2041, depends on transparent, accessible planning records. Areas like Woy Woy, Gosford waterfront and the Tuggerah Business Park precinct are all flagged for significant change, and community groups have repeatedly told council that online document accessibility is a precondition for meaningful public participation.

The NSW Government's Housing and Productivity Contribution, which applies to new developments and has been set at $12,000 per dwelling in the Central Coast local government area, also creates more DA volume — and therefore more image files entering the system each month. Without a maintained deduplication process, the problem would recur within two to three years, according to the council's internal IT audit tabled in May.

Council says it will run quarterly automated deduplication checks going forward, with the next scheduled for October 2026. Residents who notice broken images or missing attachments on active DAs are asked to report them through the council's online feedback form or by calling the Gosford Customer Service Centre on Donnison Street directly. Anyone with a DA lodged since January who experienced a submission error should check their application status on the NSW Planning Portal this week — council's planning team is reviewing the 37 flagged cases and will contact affected applicants individually.