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Years of administrative chaos, rapid staff turnover and a rushed digital rebuild left the council's online presence riddled with repeated imagery that misleads residents about their own suburbs.
Central Coast Council's public-facing website contains hundreds of duplicate and mismatched images across its planning, development and community pages — a problem that traces back directly to the organisation's near-collapse in 2020 and the emergency administration that followed. The duplication isn't cosmetic. Pages covering Gosford CBD renewal projects, flood-risk mapping in Tuggerah and development applications in The Entrance have all carried recycled stock photography or repeated local images tagged to wrong locations, creating a misleading picture of what's actually happening on the ground.
The issue matters now because the council is mid-way through a $2.1 million digital transformation program intended to rebuild community trust after the administration period. If the underlying image library isn't audited before new content goes live, communications staff warn internally that the same errors will simply migrate into the new platform. Residents who rely on council pages to track planning proposals — particularly in high-growth corridors like Warnervale and Gosford's Mann Street precinct — are getting imagery that belongs to different projects or different eras entirely.
When NSW Government administrator Rik Hart took control of Central Coast Council in October 2020 after a $565 million financial crisis, the organisation shed a large portion of its communications and digital staff within months. Those departures were not orderly. Content management systems were left mid-migration, folder structures were abandoned, and an image asset library that had been built across two legacy councils — the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council, which merged in 2016 — was never properly consolidated.
The 2016 merger itself created the foundational problem. Gosford's content library used one naming convention; Wyong's used another. Images of Gosford's waterfront near Kibble Park were filed under generic tags that also applied to Wyong's town centre near the Wyong River. When the merged council uploaded bulk content to its new site after 2016, thousands of images were matched by file date rather than subject. Nobody caught it, because the communications team was already stretched running two formerly separate councils as one.
By 2022, when the elected council was restored, the website had been through three different content management systems in six years. Each transition carried errors forward. A 2023 internal review — referenced in council's publicly available Digital Strategy document — flagged the image library as a priority risk, noting that some pages had the same photograph appearing more than six times across different sections of a single topic area.
The practical consequences show up across Gosford and Wyong. The Gosford Revitalisation pages, which track the long-running effort to reinvigorate the CBD around Kibble Park and the Central Coast Stadium precinct, have at various points displayed aerial photography from Erina rather than central Gosford. The council's Flood and Stormwater hub, which covers vulnerable areas including Toukley and Mannering Park, has recycled the same generic creek-bed image across multiple distinct catchment fact sheets.
NSW councils are required under the Local Government Act 1993 to maintain accurate and accessible public information. Duplicate or misfiled imagery on planning and environmental pages doesn't automatically constitute a legal breach, but it does create grounds for community objection when development applications are assessed, particularly if a resident can show the council's own communications misrepresented site conditions.
The council's current digital overhaul, contracted through a Gosford-based delivery partner as part of the broader post-administration recovery plan, is scheduled to complete its content audit phase by the end of the third quarter of 2026. That means anyone using the website before then should cross-reference planning information against the council's Development Application Tracker, which pulls data directly from the lodgement system and does not rely on the disputed image library. For flood or stormwater queries, the NSW Flood Data Portal maintained by the state government offers a parallel and independently maintained record for Central Coast catchments.
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Published by The Daily Central Coast