Duplicate Images on Council's Website Are More Than a Tech Glitch — They're Costing Residents Real Answers

Central Coast Council's online planning portal has a problem that sounds minor but isn't: duplicate and broken images embedded in publicly available documents are leaving residents unable to properly view flood-risk overlays, DA diagrams, and infrastructure maps. For households along Wyrrabalong National Park's western fringe, the Gosford CBD renewal corridor, and low-lying streets near Tuggerah Lake, those images are not decorative — they are the document.

The issue has surfaced at a pointed moment. With Sydney recording its hottest June since 1859 and the NSW Government accelerating climate-resilience planning obligations on councils, communities across the Central Coast are increasingly turning to Council's digital records to understand what the next decade of extreme weather events means for their properties. When the same schematic appears twice — or a flood-extent graphic fails to load entirely — residents are left making decisions without the information they're legally entitled to see.

What the Problem Actually Looks Like on the Ground

At Gosford's Kibble Park precinct, where the Council and NSW Government have staked a significant portion of the Gosford CBD Revitalisation Program, several publicly lodged development applications contain planning panels images that duplicated across multiple PDF exports. The result: a resident checking setback requirements or stormwater diagrams on the Council website receives the same cross-section image twice in sequence, with the distinct second illustration missing entirely.

The same pattern has appeared in documents associated with the Wyong Town Centre planning framework and in select bushfire-risk overlays covering suburbs north of Chittaway Road. For renters and first-home buyers — already squeezed by median house prices in the Gosford local government area that have risen sharply over the past three years — being unable to verify a property's flood or bushfire classification before signing a contract is a practical liability, not a minor inconvenience.

Central Coast Council entered administration in October 2020 and returned to elected representation in December 2022 following a period of financial and operational recovery. That recovery included an IT systems overhaul and a shift to a new document management platform. File migration processes during that period are the most plausible technical origin of the duplicate-image errors, because batch document conversion frequently produces repeated or dropped image assets when metadata tagging is inconsistent. The Council has not publicly confirmed a specific remediation timeline for the image errors as of the date of publication.

Why Getting This Fixed Has a Deadline Attached

The NSW Government's Environment and Planning department requires councils to maintain publicly legible planning documents under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. Where documents are demonstrably incomplete or misleading in their digital form, councils carry an obligation to provide accurate versions on request — but that places the burden on residents to first identify the fault, then know to ask.

The practical stakes are sharpest for the roughly 45,000 households in flood-affected zones across the Gosford and Wyong local areas, a figure derived from Council's own flood-risk management studies. A resident in Toukley or Budgewoi consulting an inundation-extent map with a duplicated image panel cannot determine whether their property sits inside or outside a 1-in-100-year flood boundary. That distinction affects insurance premiums, mortgage approvals, and Section 10.7 planning certificates — the document every property buyer in NSW must obtain before exchange of contracts.

The simplest immediate step for any resident who suspects they are viewing an incomplete Council document is to lodge a formal Government Information (Public Access) request — a GIPA request — for the original source file. GIPA requests submitted to Central Coast Council via the online portal at councilwebsite are legally required to receive a response within 20 working days. For planning certificates specifically, speaking directly with Council's duty planner at the Gosford Administration Building on Mann Street remains the fastest route to a verified, current document. The Terrigal-based Central Coast Community Legal Centre can assist residents who believe incomplete disclosures have affected a property transaction.

Council's digital services team has the tools to audit and replace duplicate image assets systematically — the question is whether it treats the fix as urgent or routine. For residents along the lake foreshores and the CBD renewal zone, the answer to that question has real money attached to it.