Council's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Central Coast Council has a data problem, and the bill for fixing it is climbing. A review of the organisation's document management systems has identified thousands of duplicate digital images — scanned planning files, development applications and property records — lodged across multiple internal platforms since the council's forced amalgamation in 2016. Resolving those duplicates is no administrative footnote. The decision about which records to keep, which to delete, and which system to anchor the region's planning future to will shape everything from DA turnaround times in Gosford to flood-risk assessments in Wyong.

The timing matters. Central Coast Council only emerged from state-imposed administration in late 2022, after a financial crisis that saw the New South Wales Government appoint administrator Rik Hart to oversee operations from October 2020. The council has spent the three years since rebuilding financial controls and internal governance. A clean, reliable digital records base is foundational to that recovery — and to the NSW Government's broader expectations of councils under the Local Government Act 1993, which sets mandatory obligations around public record-keeping.

Why Duplicates Pile Up — and Why They're Dangerous

When two councils — the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council — merged into a single entity a decade ago, they brought incompatible IT systems with them. Files were migrated, re-scanned or manually re-entered rather than cleanly integrated. The result is a records environment where a single development application on, say, Mann Street in Gosford CBD or a flood-prone lot near Tuggerah Lakes can have multiple image versions sitting in separate repositories, not always with matching metadata. Planning officers working off the wrong version of a document risk issuing advice based on superseded information — a risk that is not theoretical in a region where housing approvals and climate-resilience overlays are both politically and legally sensitive.

The State Records Act 1998 (NSW) prohibits councils from simply deleting government records without authorised disposal schedules approved by State Archives NSW. That constraint means the council cannot run a bulk purge of suspected duplicates. Each record type requires a documented retention decision. Legal and IT staff must work together, and the process — depending on the volume of affected files — can take 12 to 18 months for an organisation of Central Coast Council's size, which serves a population of around 345,000 people across more than 1,800 square kilometres.

Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three choices now sit in front of the council's executive and elected representatives. First, which document management platform becomes the single source of truth going forward — a decision that has infrastructure and licensing cost implications running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second, whether the deduplication work is handled in-house by council's information management team based at the Wyong administration centre, or whether an external records-management contractor is brought in, a route that carries its own procurement and oversight requirements under the council's post-administration governance framework. Third, how the council communicates with residents and development applicants in Erina, Terrigal, Gosford and elsewhere whose historical files may temporarily show inconsistencies during the transition period.

The Central Coast Local Planning Panel, which assesses regionally significant development applications, is among the bodies most directly affected. Any delay or confusion in the underlying records system flows directly into panel review timelines. With the Gosford CBD renewal — anchored around projects along Donnison Street and the Gosford Waterfront precinct — generating a pipeline of complex DAs, the stakes of getting records management right are immediate and financial for developers and residents alike.

Council is expected to present a formal records remediation plan to councillors before the end of the third quarter of 2026. The elected body, still rebuilding its governance credibility after administration, will need to fund the work, agree on a platform strategy, and set a public completion timeline. Residents wanting to track progress can monitor council business papers published on the Central Coast Council website ahead of ordinary meetings, typically held at the Gosford administration building on Gosford's central waterfront. The decisions made in those chambers over the next six months will be far less visible than a ribbon-cutting — and considerably harder to reverse.