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Years of fragmented IT systems, a bruising stint in state administration, and a flood of development applications have left council's property image database riddled with duplicates — and ratepayers are now paying to fix it.
Central Coast Council is partway through a remediation project to purge thousands of duplicate property images from its digital records system, a problem that council staff trace back to at least 2020, when the organisation was still operating under state-appointed administrator Rik Hart following its near-collapse over a $177 million debt crisis. The duplication issue, which affects cadastral and development application records held in the council's content management platform, has slowed planning assessments at the Gosford CBD office and created discrepancies in documents forwarded to the NSW Planning Portal.
The timing matters. The council, restored to elected control in December 2021, has spent the past four years trying to rebuild operational credibility with a ratepayer base that remains sceptical. Any fresh sign of administrative disorder lands differently on the Central Coast than it might elsewhere — here, the memory of being stripped of democratic representation is still raw, and trust in institutional competence is a live political issue rather than an abstract one.
The roots of the problem are not difficult to find if you sit with the council's own IT migration timeline. When the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council were amalgamated in May 2016 to form Central Coast Council, the two organisations brought incompatible document management systems with them. Staff working across both the Gosford and Wyong administration centres were accessing different databases for years after amalgamation, with synchronisation handled through an interim workaround rather than a unified platform.
Then came the administration period. Between October 2020 and December 2021, the council operated under emergency cost-cutting conditions. An internal digitisation push — designed to reduce reliance on physical storage across sites including the Gosford Civic Centre on Mann Street — was accelerated without the quality-control gates that would normally catch duplicate file ingestion. Images of the same property parcel, in some cases the same photograph taken at different resolutions, were catalogued separately under different metadata strings. The system counted them as distinct records.
By the time elected councillors returned in late 2021, the backlog had calcified into the live system. The council's Erina-based IT operations unit flagged the scale of the problem formally during a 2023 audit of the property information system, according to council documents tabled at a public business paper meeting. The audit identified duplication rates in certain asset categories running at levels significant enough to affect search reliability — though the council has not published a precise figure for the total number of affected records.
The remediation work is being carried out in stages. Council staff, working alongside a contracted records management firm, are running deduplication scripts against the database and manually verifying flagged files before deletion. The Gosford and Wyong council chambers' historical records — including development application photo logs stretching back to properties in suburbs like Woy Woy, Terrigal, and Budgewoi — are among the categories requiring human review rather than automated clearance, because of their heritage and legal significance.
The project is budgeted within the council's 2025-26 operational plan under the digital transformation program, which was allocated funding as part of the broader council recovery framework. No separate tender was publicly advertised for the deduplication contract, meaning the cost is absorbed within existing program expenditure.
For residents dealing with the planning system day-to-day, the practical effect has been occasional delays in DA tracking through the NSW Planning Portal and, in some cases, confusion when duplicate image files return contradictory timestamps on inspection records. The council's customer service team at the Gosford Civic Centre on Mann Street has been handling related enquiries on an ad hoc basis.
The remediation is expected to reach completion before the end of the 2026 calendar year, which would position the council to move onto the next phase of its digital transformation agenda — including a unified asset management platform covering infrastructure from Patonga to Toukley. For ratepayers who lived through the administration period, getting the basics right is the benchmark that matters most.
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Published by The Daily Central Coast