Duplicate Images in Council Planning Portals Are Costing Central Coast Residents Time and Money

Central Coast Council's online development application portal has a problem that sounds trivial until it happens to you. Duplicate images — the same photograph, plan or supporting document uploaded and indexed multiple times within a single DA submission — are causing applications to stall, confusing assessment officers and, in some cases, pushing approvals past the statutory 40-day determination window. For residents already stretched thin by housing costs averaging above $800,000 for a median house in the Gosford local area, any delay has a dollar figure attached to it.

The issue matters now for a specific reason. Central Coast Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in 2021 after a near-catastrophic financial collapse, and it has spent the years since rebuilding its systems and public trust. The council's digital planning infrastructure was flagged in its own internal improvement program as an area requiring upgrade. Duplicated image files within DA lodgements are a known symptom of that legacy system problem — and they are not cosmetic. Assessment staff working through Gosford's backlog of residential and mixed-use applications must manually identify and discard duplicate attachments before they can progress a file, adding hours to each case.

Where the Problem Hits Hardest

The practical fallout is concentrated in the areas experiencing the highest development activity. The Gosford CBD renewal corridor — running from Mann Street down to the Gosford waterfront near Leagues Club Field — currently holds dozens of active development applications for apartments, commercial conversions and community facilities. Each of those files passes through the same portal. So does every granny flat approval in Woy Woy, every renovations DA in Terrigal, and every subdivision application on the Tuggerah growth corridor near the M1.

Community groups lodging objections feel it too. The Central Coast Community Environment Network, which regularly engages with development applications affecting the region's bushland and waterways, has previously noted the time burden of navigating the council's digital systems. When duplicate images inflate a document set from 40 pages to 140, community members doing their own review face a document management task that most don't have the time or technical skill to manage. Participation in planning processes — already declining across regional NSW — drops further when the process feels opaque or unwieldy.

Builders are more direct about the cost. A standard residential extension DA lodged on the Central Coast carries a council application fee starting from around $285 for minor works, scaling steeply for larger projects. Independent certifiers and draftspeople charge separately, often between $1,500 and $4,000 for a straightforward residential submission. When a file gets bounced back due to documentation errors — including system-generated duplicates that the applicant didn't create — those professional fees restart. A single unnecessary re-lodgement can cost a homeowner more than $1,000 in re-submission preparation alone.

What Can Be Done — and What's Coming

Central Coast Council's current digital transformation roadmap, which the council publicly references in its operational planning documents, includes migration toward the NSW Planning Portal — the state government's integrated system designed to reduce exactly this kind of file management failure. The NSW Planning Portal includes deduplication logic and file validation at the point of upload, which would eliminate the problem at the source rather than leaving it to be caught downstream by an assessment officer.

The transition is not yet complete for all application types on the Central Coast. Until it is, residents and applicants can take practical steps. Before lodging any DA, applicants should open every uploaded file individually to confirm no document appears twice under different file names. Council's duty planner service, reachable through the Gosford customer service centre on Mann Street, can review a submission pre-lodgement. For community members reviewing applications on the public register, filtering by document type rather than scrolling the full attachment list cuts through the clutter faster.

The broader fix is a systems one, and it depends on the council's IT upgrade timeline holding. Given how much goodwill Central Coast Council has had to rebuild since 2021, getting the basic mechanics of public planning right is not a minor administrative footnote — it is part of the job.