How Central Coast Council's Property Register Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What That Means for Ratepayers

Central Coast Council is working to purge thousands of duplicate images from its property and asset register — a problem that traces directly back to the chaotic digitisation push that followed the council's entry into state-appointed administration in October 2020. The data mess, which spans records attached to assets from Gosford CBD streetscapes to Wyong Road drainage infrastructure, has complicated maintenance scheduling and clouded the council's picture of exactly what it owns and where.

The issue matters now because the council, which returned to elected operation in 2022 after two years under administrator Rik Hart, is mid-way through a $130 million-plus financial recovery program. Accurate asset data underpins the council's long-range financial plan, which sets maintenance budgets and depreciation schedules for roughly $4 billion in community assets. Duplicate image records don't just clutter a database — they can inflate apparent asset counts, skew condition reports and, ultimately, distort where maintenance dollars get spent.

How the Duplicates Got There

The roots of the problem go back further than the 2020 administration. Central Coast Council was itself formed only in May 2016, when Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council were merged under the NSW Government's controversial local government amalgamation program. Those two predecessor bodies ran separate asset management systems — different software, different file-naming conventions, different photographic standards. When staff attempted to pull everything into a single system, automated ingestion scripts repeatedly pulled the same images from legacy folders, creating duplicates that were difficult to identify without manual review.

The administration period made it worse. Between late 2020 and 2022, the council shed experienced staff and brought in contractors to accelerate compliance reporting. Multiple contractors, working across the Mann Street, Gosford offices and the Wyong Civic Centre on Hely Street, uploaded inspection photographs without consistent tagging protocols. The same drainage pit on Karalta Road, for instance, could end up with four separate image records tied to marginally different asset IDs.

The scale became clearer in 2024, when the council's asset management team began a formal data-quality audit as part of its broader Digital Infrastructure Improvement Program. Internal documentation tabled at a council meeting in February 2025 indicated the register contained image-duplication rates across certain asset classes that were material enough to require a dedicated remediation project. The council engaged a Newcastle-based data services firm to run automated deduplication across the system, a contract that ran through the first half of 2025.

What the Fix Looks Like — and What It Costs

Deduplication at this scale is not simply hitting a delete key. Each flagged duplicate requires a confidence check: is this actually the same asset photographed twice, or two similar-looking assets in adjacent streets? The Gosford waterfront precinct, where the council is managing multiple concurrent renewal projects along Kibble Park and the Gosford Waterfront Activation Zone, proved particularly prone to false matches — seawalls and footpath sections that looked almost identical in aerial drone shots.

The council has not published a standalone dollar figure for the remediation work, but the broader Digital Infrastructure Improvement Program was allocated funding within the council's 2024–25 operational plan. Ratepayers have an indirect stake: the NSW Office of Local Government has flagged asset data integrity as a key metric in its ongoing oversight of the council's recovery, and any material inaccuracy could trigger additional scrutiny under the council's post-administration reporting obligations.

Sydney's record-breaking winter heat this July — the hottest June since 1859, according to Bureau of Meteorology data — has added urgency to accurate infrastructure records on the Central Coast, where climate resilience planning for flooding and heat stress depends on knowing precisely where assets sit and what condition they're in. A drainage culvert mis-catalogued because its photograph was filed three times under different IDs is a culvert that might not show up on the right maintenance schedule before the next storm season.

The council's asset team expects the primary deduplication work to be complete before the end of this financial year. Staff are also drafting a new image-capture protocol — standardised file naming, GPS-embedded metadata and mandatory single-upload procedures — designed to prevent the same problem accumulating in the next asset cycle. Residents who notice discrepancies in council maintenance records for specific assets can lodge a formal data query through the council's online service request portal at coast.nsw.gov.au.