How Central Coast Council's Property Records Ended Up Full of Ghost Images — and What's Being Done to Fix It

Central Coast Council is working through a backlog of duplicated and mismatched images embedded across its digital property and planning records — a problem that staff and councillors have traced directly to the 2020–2021 administration period, when system maintenance was deprioritised as the organisation fought for financial survival.

The issue matters now because Gosford CBD renewal is accelerating. Development applications for precincts along Mann Street and around the Gosford waterfront are being assessed against digital records that, in some cases, carry the wrong site photographs or placeholder images copied across multiple lots. Planning officers have had to manually verify documents before sign-off, adding days to assessment timelines at a moment when the NSW government is pressing councils to cut approval delays.

How the Problem Began

The root cause sits in late 2020. When administrator Rik Hart took control of Central Coast Council in October that year — after the organisation revealed a $565 million debt and effectively ran out of operating cash — a skeleton IT and records team was left managing systems built for a much larger workforce. The merger of the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council in 2016 had already created a patchwork of incompatible digital platforms. When staff numbers were cut sharply during administration, routine data hygiene tasks, including auditing image attachments on property files in the Authority software system, were quietly shelved.

By the time elected councillors were restored in December 2021, the duplication had compounded. Batch uploads used to migrate old Gosford and Wyong records had assigned identical images to dozens of separate land parcels. Some files for properties in suburbs including Woy Woy, Tuggerah and Terrigal were carrying aerial photographs from entirely different locations. Council's own post-administration review, completed in 2022, flagged data integrity as a medium-priority risk but did not specify a remediation deadline.

The problem was not unique to the Central Coast. The NSW Audit Office, in its 2023 report on local government data governance, noted that council mergers across the state had frequently produced records duplication that persisted years after amalgamation. The Central Coast case was complicated by the administration overlay, which compressed the already difficult merger integration work into an environment of extreme financial pressure.

The Practical Toll on Residents and Applicants

For residents trying to lodge development applications at the Gosford planning office on Mann Street, or accessing council's online DA tracker, the duplication has occasionally surfaced as incorrect site images appearing alongside their property details. Community groups involved in planning around the Gosford Regional Gallery precinct and along the Terrigal esplanade have raised the issue at public meetings, pointing out that heritage overlay maps in some digital files were displaying images of the wrong buildings entirely.

Council confirmed in its 2025–26 operational plan, adopted in June 2025, that a digital records remediation project was underway, with $380,000 allocated across two financial years. The work is being managed through the organisation's Information Management team in partnership with a contracted records specialist. As of the end of the 2025–26 financial year, staff had cleared duplicates across roughly 60 per cent of active planning files, with the remainder — predominantly older pre-2016 Wyong Shire records — scheduled for completion by December 2026.

The practical advice for anyone lodging a DA or requesting property information from Central Coast Council right now is straightforward: cross-check any site image or cadastral map shown in the online portal against the NSW Land Registry Services title search, which draws from a separate state-maintained database unaffected by the council's internal duplication issue. The Land Registry search costs $14.90 for a standard title document. If images in council's system appear obviously wrong — a paddock where a house should be, or a coastal property showing an inland lot — contact the Gosford planning counter directly and ask staff to manually verify the file before any formal submission is lodged.

Council has said it expects the full remediation to be complete before the next state election cycle intensifies scrutiny on approval times. The Minns government's push to fast-track housing decisions, particularly in designated transport corridors including the Central Coast rail line, means there is political as well as administrative pressure to have clean records in place well before new planning overlays are applied to the region in 2027.