Outdated and Wrong: What Officials and Experts Are Saying About Duplicate Property Images Plaguing Central Coast's Planning Records

Central Coast Council is under mounting pressure to overhaul the duplicated and outdated imagery embedded in its property and planning record systems, with local housing advocates, GIS professionals and community voices arguing the problem is quietly distorting decisions on development applications, flood risk assessments and infrastructure planning across the region.

The issue surfaced publicly again this week after several development applicants lodged complaints with council's planning counter at Gosford's Mann Street offices, reporting that aerial and site photographs attached to their DA files showed pre-demolition structures, overgrown vacant lots, or imagery that pre-dated the 2022 flooding events along Tuggerah Lake's foreshore. Council staff, advocates say, have been working from reference images that simply do not reflect what exists on the ground today.

Why It Matters Right Now

The timing is not incidental. Central Coast Council only exited formal financial administration in late 2021 after a prolonged intervention by the NSW Government, and the organisation has spent the years since rebuilding internal systems. Data governance — including the currency and accuracy of imagery attached to planning records — was not always a visible priority during that recovery period. Now, with Gosford CBD renewal activity accelerating under the Central Coast Regional Plan 2041, and with the NSW Government's Transport Oriented Development program pushing higher-density housing within 400 metres of Gosford and Wyong railway stations, the accuracy of site records has taken on direct financial and legal weight.

Residential land values around Gosford station have climbed significantly over the past three years, with some parcels on Donnison Street and Georgiana Terrace now transacting above $2 million for mixed-use sites. Errors in the imagery layers attached to those records — showing older building footprints or pre-remediation conditions — can affect shadow diagrams, heritage overlays, and stormwater calculations submitted with development applications.

The Central Coast Local Housing Strategy, adopted to guide dwelling targets through to 2041, relies on accurate land-use data to identify infill capacity. GIS practitioners who work with local councils say duplicate imagery — where two or more photographs of the same property exist in a records system with conflicting dates or metadata — creates compounding errors when automated tools query those datasets for planning analysis. Gosford's Kibble Park precinct and the redevelopment sites flanking Central Coast Highway at Wyong are both areas where data currency problems have reportedly caused processing delays.

The Calls for Action

Housing advocates connected to the Central Coast Community Housing Forum have raised the imagery and data accuracy question directly with council in submissions to this year's operational plan consultation. Their position, outlined in written submissions rather than attributed to any single spokesperson, is that the council should commit to an annual aerial capture program with mandatory metadata standards — a step that several other NSW regional councils, including Lake Macquarie City Council, have already formalised.

The NSW Government's own Spatial Services division, operating under the Department of Customer Service, maintains the state's Six-monthly High Resolution Imagery program, which provides updated aerial photography to councils at no cost. Critics argue Central Coast Council has been slow to integrate successive releases of that program into its live planning map layers, leaving officers and applicants consulting imagery that in some cases dates to before the January 2022 floods reshaped sections of the Tuggerah Lakes foreshore and the low-lying residential streets of Chittaway Bay.

For property owners and developers currently working through the DA system, the practical advice from planning consultants operating in the region is straightforward: do not rely solely on council's published mapping portal. Independent survey photography, dated and geotagged, should accompany any application that involves a site with a recent demolition, flood impact, or substantial vegetation change. Submissions to council's current round of planning consultations — open until late July 2026 — represent the clearest near-term opportunity for the community to formally press the case for a funded imagery refresh program embedded in the 2026–27 council budget cycle.