Central Coast Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Across Digital Property Records This Week

Central Coast Council confirmed this week it is working through a backlog of duplicate and misfiled images inside its digital development application portal, a problem that planning staff say has been compounding since the agency emerged from state administration in 2021. The cleanup, which began in earnest during the last week of June 2026, affects property records held on the council's public-facing ePlanning platform — the same system residents in Gosford, Wyong and the broader region use to track DA lodgements and approvals.

The timing matters. Council is currently processing a higher-than-usual volume of development applications tied to the Gosford CBD Urban Renewal Corridor and several medium-density rezoning proposals along the Mann Street and Donnison Street precincts. Duplicate or incorrectly tagged images — floor plans attached to the wrong lot, for instance, or site photos appearing under multiple reference numbers — slow assessment times and can generate formal objection windows based on incorrect documentation.

What Went Wrong and When

The duplicate image issue appears to trace partly back to a 2022 migration of legacy records from the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council systems into a unified database. Council has not publicly released a total count of affected records, but the remediation project was listed as an active IT workstream in council's June 2026 business paper, published on the council website ahead of the most recent ordinary meeting. The paper identified the digital records team as the responsible unit, without specifying a completion date.

Property owners and solicitors in suburbs including Erina, Wamberal and Terrigal who rely on accurate DA history documents for conveyancing have long flagged the portal's inconsistencies. The Central Coast Local Aboriginal Land Council, which manages a number of properties across the region, and community advocacy groups connected to the Gosford Waterfront Alliance have both previously raised concerns — through separate channels — about the reliability of publicly available planning records, though neither has issued formal statements this week about the current remediation effort.

For context on scale: Central Coast Council's planning department processed more than 3,200 development applications in the 2024–25 financial year, according to figures included in council's annual report. Each DA lodgement typically involves multiple uploaded documents and image attachments, meaning even a low error rate across that volume produces a substantial remediation task.

What Residents Should Do Now

Council's customer service centre at 2 Hely Street, Wyong and the Gosford office at 49 Mann Street remain the primary contact points for anyone who believes a specific property record contains a duplicated or incorrect image. Planning staff are advising applicants with active DAs to cross-check their submitted documents against the portal's current display and lodge a formal correction request if discrepancies appear.

The remediation work also arrives as Council prepares to roll out an upgraded version of its online DA tracking system, flagged for a late 2026 deployment. That upgrade, which council described in budget documentation adopted in June 2026 as part of a broader digital services investment, is meant to include automated file validation that would catch duplicate uploads at the point of lodgement rather than after the fact.

For buyers and sellers, the practical advice from conveyancers working in the region is straightforward: request a fresh council property information certificate — a Section 10.7 certificate under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act — rather than relying solely on the portal's document history during any transaction conducted before the system upgrade is complete. Those certificates, which cost $133 for a standard planning certificate in NSW as of the current fee schedule, are generated directly from council's assessed records and carry legal weight that a portal screenshot does not.

Council has not indicated whether the current cleanup will require any DA decisions to be reconsidered or renotified. The ordinary council meeting scheduled for July 2026 is expected to include a further update from the planning directorate.