Central Coast's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Region Stacks Up Against Cities Tackling the Same Planning Headache

Central Coast Council is confronting a surprisingly stubborn data quality issue inside its digital planning systems: thousands of duplicate and outdated property images lodged across development applications, heritage registers, and the council's public-facing property portal. The problem is not unique to the Central Coast, but the region's particular circumstances — three years out of external administration, a CBD renewal program underway in Gosford, and pressure to modernise services for a population that grew past 350,000 during the pandemic — make the stakes higher than they might be elsewhere.

The timing matters. Sydney recorded its hottest June since 1859 this week, a data point that has sharpened conversations about climate resilience planning across coastal NSW. Accurate, up-to-date property imagery is foundational to that work: flood mapping, bushfire overlays, and heritage assessments all depend on clean photographic records tied to the correct parcel of land. When an image is duplicated across two or more addresses, or when a 2009 photograph is still attached to a site that was demolished and rebuilt in 2021, planners can make decisions based on conditions that no longer exist.

What Central Coast Is Actually Doing

The council's Digital and Customer Experience directorate has been running a data cleansing program under its broader IT recovery roadmap, a framework that emerged from the recommendations made during the administration period that ended in March 2023. The Gosford CBD precinct — specifically properties along Mann Street and the Kibble Park surrounds — has been prioritised for image audits because of the volume of active development applications in that corridor. The Central Coast Local Planning Panel, which assesses larger residential and commercial proposals, flagged the image duplication issue in at least two determination reports during 2024 and 2025, noting that supporting photographic evidence submitted by applicants had in some cases been drawn from council's own portal rather than fresh site surveys.

Erina Fair's surrounding commercial precinct and the waterfront at Gosford's Central Coast Mariners stadium site have also been nominated as secondary audit zones, given both areas have seen significant physical change in recent years. The council has not publicly disclosed a completion date or budget for the full remediation program.

How Other Cities Are Handling It

The comparison with similar-sized cities overseas is instructive, if not flattering. Nottingham City Council in the United Kingdom completed a full audit of its Local Land and Property Gazetteer image records in 2023, eliminating roughly 14,000 duplicate entries from a database of around 130,000 parcels — a process that took 18 months and drew on a dedicated two-person team. Christchurch City Council in New Zealand, rebuilding its planning systems after the 2011 earthquake sequence, embedded automated duplicate-detection software into its Objective ECM platform by 2022, reducing manual review time by an estimated 60 percent according to a case study published by the Local Government New Zealand network.

Newcastle, the closest comparable NSW city, updated its spatial data governance policy in 2024 as part of its Smart City Strategy, requiring all property images submitted with development applications to carry embedded GPS metadata — a straightforward technical requirement that makes it far easier to catch duplicates at lodgement rather than years later. Central Coast has no equivalent requirement in place as of July 2026.

The gap between leading practice and current local performance is a direct legacy of the financial crisis that consumed the council's technology investment capacity between 2020 and 2023. The administration period froze most non-essential capital expenditure, and IT infrastructure sat largely untouched for nearly three years.

Property owners and developers with active applications in the Gosford CBD or along the Terrigal-Avoca Beach coastal strip should independently verify that photographs attached to their applications in council's ePlanning portal reflect current site conditions, not archived images pulled from a previous submission. If a discrepancy is identified, contacting Central Coast Council's Development Assessment team directly — rather than waiting for a planner to raise it — will reduce the risk of a determination being delayed or referred back for additional information. The council's customer service centre on Mann Street in Gosford can initiate a data correction request on behalf of applicants.