By the Numbers: Central Coast Council's Duplicate Image Problem Is Bigger Than Anyone Admitted

Central Coast Council is sitting on a digital asset library bloated by an estimated 40,000 duplicate images, according to figures tabled at a recent council operations briefing, a legacy mess that is slowing planning portal response times and costing ratepayers money to store data that serves no administrative purpose.

The timing matters. Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in 2021 after a financial crisis that left it with a debt load requiring years of careful management. The Gosford CBD renewal program, a suite of planning and infrastructure projects centred on the Mann Street and Kibble Park precinct, depends on a functioning digital records system to process development applications efficiently. Every hour a planner spends hunting through duplicated image files is an hour not spent assessing a DA in a region where housing supply is under severe pressure.

How the Numbers Stack Up

The duplicate image problem is not unique to local government, but the scale on the Central Coast reflects the chaos of the administration period between October 2020 and May 2021, when two separate IT systems were run in parallel. Officers migrating records from the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council databases — which merged in 2016 but retained separate backend infrastructure for years — copied image files multiple times without systematic deduplication. The result is a repository where a single DA photograph of a Terrigal driveway or a Long Jetty subdivision boundary can appear seven or eight times under different file naming conventions.

Storage costs for council's cloud infrastructure are charged per gigabyte per month. Industry benchmarks from the Australian Local Government Association suggest mid-tier councils spend between $180,000 and $340,000 annually on digital storage contracts, and duplicated assets can account for 20 to 35 per cent of total storage volume in organisations that went through forced system migrations. Applying those figures to Central Coast's known duplication rate of roughly 40,000 files — each averaging between 3MB and 8MB — suggests the council may be paying to store between 120GB and 320GB of entirely redundant data.

The council's planning services team at Gosford's Councilview Hub on Donnison Street is the unit most directly affected. Staff processing development applications for the Gosford Waterfront Urban Renewal Corridor, which stretches from the rail precinct down to Leagues Club Field, have flagged in internal notes that image retrieval delays add between 15 and 45 minutes per complex application. With roughly 3,200 DAs lodged across the local government area in the 2024–25 financial year, even conservative estimates put the cumulative administrative drag in the hundreds of hours.

The Cleanup Program and What Ratepayers Can Expect

Council has engaged a records management firm to run a deduplication sweep across the library, targeting the planning, infrastructure, and community services image collections first. The Gosford and Wyong imaging archives — which include aerial survey photographs dating to the mid-1990s — are scheduled for processing in the third and fourth quarters of 2026. The contract value has not been made public, but comparable deduplication projects in New South Wales local government have typically cost between $85,000 and $160,000 depending on archive size and the degree of manual review required.

For residents and developers lodging DAs through the NSW Planning Portal, the practical effect should be shorter load times on the council's public-facing document viewer by late 2026. The Erina town centre rezoning process and the Warnervale employment lands review — both of which involve large image datasets from site inspections and community consultation sessions — are the next major planning projects that will stress-test whether the deduplication work has held.

The broader lesson from the Central Coast numbers is that the administrative cost of a council merger rarely ends at the point of formal amalgamation. Seven years after Gosford and Wyong formally became one entity, the digital housekeeping bill is still arriving. Ratepayers in suburbs from Woy Woy to Toukley are ultimately the ones paying to fix it.