Central Coast Council Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Its Digital Renewal Push

Central Coast Council confirmed this week it is working through a significant backlog of duplicated digital images that have slowed development assessment workflows, with the problem most acute in the Gosford CBD renewal precinct and along the Terrigal Drive corridor. The issue, which Council's records management team identified in a recent internal audit, has affected the digital document library used by planners assessing development applications across the region.

The timing matters. Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in 2021 after a financial crisis that left its systems fragmented across two legacy councils — the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council. The digital cleanup that followed merged thousands of files, and it is that 2021-era migration that planners believe introduced the majority of the duplicates now clogging the system.

What the Backlog Means on the Ground

For residents and developers waiting on approvals near Mann Street in Gosford or along Karalta Road in Erina, the practical consequence has been slower turnaround times on applications that require heritage or flood overlays to be cross-checked against site photography. Council's development assessment unit processes more than 3,000 applications annually across the local government area. Where a planner must manually verify which of two near-identical images is the current, accurate record, assessment time blows out.

The Gosford CBD renewal program — which has been the centrepiece of Council's post-administration recovery agenda — involves multiple concurrent development applications on sites between Donnison Street and the waterfront at Gosford Waterfront Reserve. Duplicated images of streetscapes, drainage infrastructure and heritage items have, according to Council's published digital records strategy, been flagged as a risk to the integrity of planning decisions.

The Central Coast Highway upgrade corridor and proposed active transport links to Tuggerah have also been affected, with infrastructure project teams reporting that duplicated drone survey images uploaded by contractors in 2023 have had to be manually sorted before being used in design documentation.

What Council Is Doing This Week

From July 1, Council began a structured deduplication process using software across its enterprise content management platform. The project is scheduled to run through to the end of September 2026. A Council spokesperson — the records management team did not respond to a request for an on-record named comment by deadline — confirmed through Council's public communications channel that the process is underway and that no development applications will be paused during the remediation work.

Council's digital records strategy, published in 2024, identified the organisation's document management system as holding more than 1.2 million files inherited from the two predecessor councils, with an estimated duplication rate of around 8 percent in some asset categories. Photographic records related to built assets were among the highest-risk categories identified in that document.

The work also carries relevance for Council's open data commitments. The organisation has been under pressure from the NSW Office of Local Government to improve its digital governance standards as a condition of its ongoing financial recovery benchmarks. Clean image records underpin everything from flood risk mapping to the heritage registers that govern what can be built in the Gosford CBD.

For anyone with a development application currently sitting with Council, the advice from the planning team is to ensure any site photographs submitted with applications after July 1 carry clear metadata — including the date the photo was taken and the GPS coordinates of the location — to avoid having new files caught up in the existing backlog. The Central Coast Development Hub on Mann Street, Gosford, is open weekdays for in-person enquiries. Council's website also lists the current median assessment timeframes by application category, which were last updated in June 2026.