Central Coast Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Across Digital Planning Portal This Week

Central Coast Council confirmed this week it is working through a backlog of duplicate images embedded in its public-facing Development Application tracker, after an internal audit flagged the problem in late June. The issue affects document sets lodged through the NSW Planning Portal, the state-mandated system through which residents in Gosford, Wyong and surrounding suburbs search and review DA submissions.

The timing matters. Council is midway through a technology consolidation program begun after its return from State Government administration in 2021, and any confidence gap in the portal's data integrity lands at a sensitive moment. The Gosford CBD Urban Renewal project — which has generated dozens of active DAs along Mann Street and the foreshore precinct over the past 18 months — relies heavily on that same portal for community transparency. Residents searching submissions tied to proposed mixed-use towers near Kibble Park have in some cases been served repeated copies of the same architectural plan set, making it difficult to identify the most current version of a document.

What the Audit Found

The audit, conducted by Council's Information Management team during the week ending 27 June 2026, identified duplicate image files primarily across DAs lodged between January 2024 and March 2026. Council's Digital Services group is coordinating with the NSW Department of Planning's portal team to de-duplicate the affected records without breaking existing hyperlinks that have been shared in public submissions and community newsletters. The work is expected to take at least three weeks, with priority given to active applications — those still within their public notification windows.

The Wyong area is also affected. Applications tied to the Warnervale Town Centre rezoning proposal, which sits within the Lake Macquarie and Central Coast growth corridor, include document bundles where stormwater management plans appear more than once in the public file view. For residents already anxious about flooding and climate resilience — concerns that sharpened after the 2021 and 2022 flooding events across Tuggerah and Charmhaven — seeing incomplete or confusing documentation feeds distrust of the planning process.

Council's online DA tracker currently lists more than 340 applications as active across the local government area. Of those, the internal review flagged roughly 60 as containing confirmed duplicate image entries. That figure represents about 18 per cent of the active caseload, according to a summary circulated to Councillors at a briefing on 1 July 2026.

What Residents Should Do Right Now

Anyone who has downloaded planning documents from the Central Coast Council portal in the past six months is advised to re-download files after 25 July 2026, when the remediation window is expected to close. Council's Customer Service Centre at 2 Hely Street, Wyong, and the Gosford office at 49 Mann Street can provide printed copies of any DA document set on request — a fallback option that remains available regardless of the portal's status.

The Gosford office is open Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 4.30pm. Residents who have lodged formal objections based on documents downloaded before the audit was announced should check whether the files they referenced were among the affected 60 applications. Council has said it will notify affected submitters directly by email where contact details are held on file.

The broader lesson for Council is structural. Its 2024-2028 Digital Transformation Roadmap — adopted in March 2024 — committed to annual data-quality audits of all public-facing systems. This week's cleanup suggests the June 2026 audit cycle caught something the 2025 review did not. Whether the cadence is sufficient for a portal that processes thousands of new document uploads each year is a question Council's IT governance committee is likely to revisit at its next scheduled meeting in August.

For now, the practical advice is simple: if you are tracking a DA in Gosford, Terrigal, Toukley or anywhere else on the Coast, treat any portal download before late July as potentially incomplete and check back after the remediation deadline.