Duplicate Image Problem in Council Records: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Central Coast Council is confronting a sprawling duplicate-image problem buried inside its planning and asset management databases, a legacy of the financial crisis that sent the organisation into state administration in October 2020. Property files, infrastructure inspection records and development application attachments accumulated across multiple software platforms during that period, and staff are now finding the same photographs and diagrams logged two, three or more times inside the same project folders.

The timing matters. Council finalised its return from administration in 2022 and has since been working through a backlog of deferred maintenance and governance tasks. Digital records hygiene — unglamorous as it sounds — sits at the centre of that effort, because inaccurate asset registers directly affect how capital works budgets are allocated across a region of more than 340,000 residents stretching from Mooney Mooney Creek in the south to Lake Macquarie's southern shore in the north.

Why Gosford and Wyong Bear the Brunt

The duplication is concentrated in files tied to two areas: the Gosford CBD renewal precinct around Mann Street and the Wyong town centre corridor along Pacific Highway. Both zones have been subject to multiple rounds of surveying, rezoning studies and grant-funded infrastructure assessments since 2018, meaning the same site photographs were uploaded by different teams using different naming conventions. Council's geographic information systems team, based at the Wyong administration building on Hely Street, began a formal audit of the image libraries in March 2026 after project managers flagged that storage costs for the council's cloud-based asset management platform had risen beyond what the volume of new work could justify.

Professionals working in local government records management around NSW have noted that the problem is not unique to the Central Coast. The Local Government Information and Technology NSW group, which coordinates digital standards for councils across the state, has previously identified unstructured file migration during administration periods as a recurring source of record bloat. The Central Coast situation is among the larger examples because of the sheer volume of development activity in the Gosford waterfront precinct, where the NSW Government's Gosford Revitalisation Strategy has been driving near-continuous site documentation since 2019.

What the Fix Involves — and What It Costs

Deduplication at scale is not simply a matter of running a software tool. Image files tied to planning and development applications carry legal evidentiary weight under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, which means records managers cannot delete a file without confirming an authoritative copy exists and has been correctly indexed. That verification step is what consumes time and money. Council procurement records published on the NSW eTendering portal in May 2026 show a contract awarded for digital records remediation services valued at just under $180,000, covering work across the Gosford and Wyong asset libraries through to December 2026.

Independent records management specialists familiar with similar projects in the Hunter and Illawarra regions have described a typical deduplication cycle for a mid-sized council as running three to six months when legal admissibility requirements apply — roughly consistent with the Central Coast timeline. The core challenge is that automated hash-matching tools can identify pixel-identical duplicates quickly, but photographs taken seconds apart of the same drainage culvert or footpath crack do not register as duplicates even though they carry identical evidentiary value. Human review cannot be avoided.

For ratepayers, the practical consequence of getting this right is accurate cost data underpinning the next long-term financial plan, which Council is scheduled to present for community consultation before the end of the 2026 calendar year. Infrastructure renewal estimates that are inflated by double-counted asset condition records can distort priority rankings and, by extension, where repair crews are sent. The Mann Street streetscape upgrade and the Ettalong Beach foreshore path resurfacing project are both listed in the current delivery program as relying on asset condition scores drawn from the same databases under audit.

Council has advised through its website that the remediation work is being conducted in stages and that planning portal services will not be interrupted. Residents with active development applications in the Gosford or Wyong town centres who want to confirm their documentation is correctly filed can contact Council's customer service centre on the Central Coast's 1300 number or visit the Gosford office on Donnison Street in person during business hours.