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A years-long accumulation of scanning errors, system migrations and pandemic-era staffing gaps has created a document management headache that now shapes how the council handles everything from development applications to flood-risk assessments.
Central Coast Council is working through a substantial backlog of duplicate and missing images in its digital property records system — a problem that traces back more than a decade, through two council amalgamations, at least three software migrations, and a period of financial administration that stripped the organisation of senior technical staff at a critical moment.
The issue matters now because the council is simultaneously pushing through its Gosford City Centre Revitalisation program, processing a surge in development applications driven by housing affordability pressure from Sydney, and trying to finalise a coastal and flood-risk mapping update required under the NSW Government's Planning and Environment guidelines. All three workstreams depend on clean, retrievable digital records tied to individual land parcels. Duplicate image entries — where the same scanned document is stored under multiple file references — slow down DA assessments and can produce conflicting information when planning officers pull property histories.
The short answer is that nobody was watching the filing cabinet while the building was on fire. The longer answer starts in 2016, when the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council were merged by the NSW Government to form Central Coast Council. That merger brought together two incompatible records management platforms, and the conversion process — handled under tight deadlines — produced thousands of mislinked document entries across properties from Terrigal in the south to Lake Munmorah in the north.
A second wave of problems arrived when the council migrated to a new enterprise content management system in 2019. Staff in the document services team, based at the council's Mann Street administrative centre in Gosford, flagged at the time that automated batch uploads were generating duplicate image records at a rate the system's deduplication tools could not keep pace with. By the time the council entered financial administration in October 2020 — placed under the control of state-appointed administrator Rik Hart following a budget crisis — the technical team had shrunk and the backlog had grown.
The administration period, which ran until May 2023 when an elected council was restored, prioritised financial stabilisation over records remediation. That was understandable given the circumstances, but it meant roughly three years passed with minimal progress on the underlying image duplication problem. Post-administration audits found that the records management function had been operating with a reduced team for most of that period.
Property owners lodging development applications through the council's online portal at Wyong or Gosford service centres have in some cases experienced extended assessment timeframes when their land parcel is linked to a file containing duplicate or conflicting scanned documents. Planning officers must manually verify which version of a document is the authoritative one before they can rely on it — a step that adds days, sometimes longer, to processing times.
The problem has a specific resonance for properties in flood-affected areas around Tuggerah Lake and along the Wyong River corridor, where planning officers need accurate historical records to assess current and future flood risk. Incorrect or duplicated survey images attached to a parcel can complicate that risk assessment.
Council's current digital transformation program, announced in late 2024, includes a dedicated document remediation workstream targeting exactly these legacy records. The program involves a systematic audit of image records attached to parcels in the Gosford LGA first, then Wyong, with a completion target set for the 2027-28 financial year. Residents with active DAs or pending property inquiries can contact the council's records services team directly through the Gosford administration centre on Mann Street to request a manual verification of documents attached to their specific parcel.
The broader lesson from Central Coast's experience is one other amalgamated NSW councils are watching closely. Getting the records right before the next planning challenge arrives — and on the Central Coast, that challenge is already here in the form of housing targets and climate mapping — is not optional groundwork. It is the foundation everything else sits on.
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Published by The Daily Central Coast