The Numbers Don't Lie: Central Coast's Duplicate Image Problem Is Bigger Than Anyone Admits

Central Coast Council is carrying an estimated 340,000 duplicate digital image files across its asset management and planning databases — a figure drawn from an internal records audit completed in March 2026 — and the cleanup bill is shaping up to be one of the more unglamorous line items in this year's operational budget.

The timing matters. Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in late 2023 after a financial collapse that left it $565 million in debt. Every dollar spent on preventable IT inefficiency is a dollar the organisation cannot direct toward the Gosford CBD renewal program or the flood mitigation works still outstanding across low-lying suburbs from Toukley to Tuggerah. The duplicate image problem is not glamorous, but it is expensive.

Where the Bloat Came From

The duplication problem traces back to at least 2018, when Council migrated records from three legacy systems into a single enterprise content management platform. Staff across the Wyong Road administrative offices and the Gosford Administration Building on Mann Street were uploading the same development application photographs, infrastructure inspection images, and community event assets independently, with no deduplication protocol in place. By the time the administration period ended, the problem had compounded across roughly 14 separate departmental folders.

An audit commissioned by the council's ICT Transformation Program — one of the structural reforms demanded by administrator Rik Hart — found that 38 per cent of all stored images in the planning and assets divisions were exact or near-exact duplicates. Storage costs for the council's cloud infrastructure ran to approximately $2.10 per gigabyte per month under its current Microsoft Azure contract. With duplicate files accounting for an estimated 4.7 terabytes of wasted storage, the redundant spend works out to roughly $9,870 a month, or just under $118,000 a year.

Gosford-based digital records consultancy DataBridge NSW, which has worked with several Hunter and Central Coast councils since 2021, estimated in a February 2026 industry report that duplicate image replacement projects of similar scale typically cost between $45,000 and $90,000 to execute properly, depending on whether manual review is required for near-duplicate images that automated tools cannot confidently flag. The payback period, on Central Coast's figures, would be less than 12 months.

What the Clean-Up Actually Involves

Replacing or removing duplicate images is not simply a matter of deleting files. Council's records obligations under the State Records Act 1998 (NSW) mean that certain images attached to development applications lodged through the NSW Planning Portal cannot be deleted without a formal disposal authority. Staff at the Erina Service Centre, which handles a significant volume of walk-in DA inquiries, have been told the backlog of flagged duplicates in active DA files alone runs to more than 12,000 individual image records.

The ICT Transformation Program has earmarked $67,000 in the 2026-27 draft operational plan for a duplicate detection and replacement project, with a target completion date of March 2027. The project will use automated hash-matching software to identify exact duplicates and a machine-learning tool for near-duplicates, followed by a human review phase handled by two temporary records officers based at the Gosford office.

For residents, the practical upshot is faster processing of applications that touch image-heavy records — subdivision certificates, infrastructure inspection sign-offs, and heritage documentation for properties in the Gosford Heritage Conservation Area along the waterfront precinct. Council's own 2025 service performance data showed DA processing times averaged 62 days against a 40-day benchmark, and records retrieval delays were cited as a contributing factor in 27 per cent of overdue cases.

The draft operational plan goes to public exhibition in August 2026. Ratepayers wanting to scrutinise the ICT allocation can access the document through Council's Your Voice Our Coast engagement portal or attend one of three planned community information sessions, with dates yet to be confirmed at Gosford, Wyong, and The Entrance.