Central Coast Council's Digital Asset Overhaul Hits a Milestone This Week

Central Coast Council has completed the first full audit phase of a digital asset clean-up program targeting duplicate, low-resolution and mislabelled images embedded across its public-facing web portals — a process that has quietly disrupted how development application files and community consultation documents appear online since late June.

The timing matters. Council has spent the past three years clawing back credibility after the 2020–2021 administration period, when financial mismanagement led to an effective collapse of normal operations. Rebuilding public trust depends partly on whether residents can actually find and read documents about projects reshaping places like the Gosford CBD and the waterfront along Mann Street. Broken image links and duplicate file entries have repeatedly frustrated that access.

What the Audit Found — and What Changed This Week

The clean-up, coordinated through Council's Information and Communication Technology directorate, identified several hundred duplicate image files sitting inside the document management system used to publish Development Applications on the NSW Planning Portal. Many duplicates originated from a 2022 migration of legacy Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council archives — two separate IT systems that were merged, imperfectly, after the 2016 council amalgamation.

Among the practical consequences this week: DA tracking pages for projects in Gosford CBD, Erina Fair precinct and the Woy Woy waterfront were temporarily displaying broken image placeholders while replacement files were uploaded and indexed. Council's website noted scheduled maintenance affecting the DA portal between July 1 and July 3, though the underlying cause — the image replacement work — was not described in detail in that notice.

The Gosford CBD renewal program, which currently lists more than a dozen active applications along Mann Street, Donnison Street and the former Gosford Performing Arts Centre site on Kibble Park, relies on visual site plans being accessible to residents making submissions. Submissions windows are time-limited under NSW planning rules, meaning even short periods of inaccessibility carry real consequences for community participation.

Why Residents and Developers Are Watching

The NSW Government's Housing Accelerator Fund, which directed $35 million to the Central Coast in 2024 to fast-track rezoning and infrastructure planning, requires Council to maintain updated digital records as part of compliance reporting. Duplicate image files sitting in the system — sometimes attached to the wrong DA or referencing demolished structures — create audit headaches that could affect that compliance standing.

Council's IT team has flagged that roughly 40 per cent of the duplicate images identified in the audit predate 2018 and relate to sites in the former Wyong local government area, including areas around Tuggerah Business Park and Lake Haven. Those duplicates are largely historical and pose less immediate risk to active planning processes, but they still inflate the system's storage load and slow document retrieval times for staff.

The Central Coast Community Environment Network, which regularly lodges detailed submissions on development applications in areas including Terrigal and Avoca Beach, has previously raised concerns in public forums about inconsistent document availability on Council's portal. Those concerns have not yet translated into formal complaints about this week's specific outage, but the group monitors portal reliability closely ahead of submission deadlines.

For residents tracking applications or waiting to lodge submissions, Council's customer service centre at 2 Hely Street, Wyong and the Gosford office at 49 Mann Street remain the fallback options for accessing hard-copy DA files during any portal disruption. Council has also indicated that the image replacement work should be fully resolved by mid-July, after which the DA portal is expected to operate with a leaner, de-duplicated file library. Whether that makes document access measurably faster will become clear over the following weeks as new applications come through for Gosford's growing pipeline of medium-density residential projects.