Central Coast Council Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Gosford Renewal Project Pages

Central Coast Council's digital communications team has begun a structured audit of its online project library after an internal review identified a significant number of duplicate and incorrectly labelled images across the Your Voice Our Coast engagement portal and the Gosford City Centre Masterplan subdomain. The review, which got underway in the last week of June 2026, is expected to conclude by mid-July before council's next ordinary meeting on July 22.

The problem matters because Central Coast Council is mid-stream through one of the most publicly scrutinised periods in its recent history. Having emerged from state-appointed administration only in 2023, the organisation is under pressure to demonstrate it can manage major public projects cleanly and transparently. Duplicate or mismatched images on consultation and planning pages may seem minor, but they undermine the credibility of documents that residents in suburbs like Wyoming, West Gosford and Woy Woy rely on to understand what is actually being proposed near their homes.

What the Audit Found

The review identified repeated use of the same stock photograph — a wide-angle shot of the Gosford waterfront near Georgiana Terrace — appearing across at least four separate project pages as if representing different precincts. A photograph tagged as showing the proposed Mann Street corridor upgrade was in several instances displaying an image from an entirely different location. Council's communications unit confirmed the review is ongoing but declined to provide a full count of affected pages before the audit is complete.

The duplication issue is linked in part to a content migration carried out in late 2024, when council transitioned its engagement materials from a legacy system to a new platform managed under its Digital Transformation Program. Large batches of images were uploaded in bulk at that time, and metadata tagging was inconsistently applied. According to the 2024-25 Annual Report published by Central Coast Council, the Digital Transformation Program received $1.4 million in allocated funding across that financial year, covering infrastructure, software licensing and staff training.

Community groups tracking the Gosford CBD renewal have taken note. The Central Coast Community Environment Network, which is based in Gosford and regularly submits to council planning processes, has long called for clearer visual documentation in development consultation. The image audit — while technical in nature — intersects directly with longstanding concerns about whether residents are seeing accurate representations of proposed changes to precincts like the Gosford Heritage Conservation Area and the foreshore around Kibble Park.

What Happens Next

Council's digital team has said it will replace all confirmed duplicate or mislabelled images with correctly attributed photographs before the Your Voice Our Coast portal reopens for the next round of Gosford City Centre consultation, scheduled for late July. Each replaced image is to be accompanied by a geotag and a project reference number, a standard the team did not consistently apply during the 2024 migration.

For residents who use the portal regularly — particularly those in the Gosford, Erina and Wamberal catchments weighing in on flood resilience and housing density proposals — the practical advice is straightforward: if you are reviewing a current project page and an image looks unfamiliar or inconsistent with the locality described, use the feedback button on the Your Voice Our Coast portal to flag it. Council has confirmed it is monitoring those flags as part of the audit workflow.

The broader lesson here is not trivial. The Council spent more than two years rebuilding public trust after the administration period that began in 2020. A clean, accurate digital record is part of that rebuilding work. Getting the images right on a planning portal is unglamorous but it is exactly the kind of operational discipline that tells residents whether the organisation has genuinely changed.