Central Coast Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem in Digital Property Records This Week

Central Coast Council has spent this week working through a backlog of duplicated images embedded in its online Development Application (DA) tracker, after an internal audit identified the problem had been quietly compounding for at least 18 months across the council's public-facing planning portal.

The issue matters now because council is mid-way through the Gosford CBD revitalisation push and processing a surge of residential DA lodgements — many tied to the state government's housing targets under the NSW Housing and Productivity Contribution framework that came into effect in late 2024. When duplicate images clog a digital record system, planners, certifiers and objecting neighbours can all end up reviewing the wrong version of a site plan or elevation drawing, a mistake that can delay approvals or, in the worst case, result in a build proceeding against a superseded design.

What the Audit Found and Where the Problems Clustered

The audit, conducted by council's Information Management team based at the Gosford administration offices on Mann Street, identified roughly 340 individual DA files containing at least one duplicate image attachment as of 1 July 2026. The duplicates were concentrated in applications lodged between January 2025 and March 2026 — a period that coincided with a migration of data to council's updated content management platform. Affected files spanned projects in suburbs including Erina, Tuggerah, Warnervale and several sites along the Terrigal esplanade.

The problem is not unique to the Central Coast. Councils across NSW have grappled with image-duplication issues since the statewide rollout of the NSW Planning Portal, which processes DA lodgements electronically. But council's own system — which mirrors documents from the state portal into a local repository for internal workflow — introduced a secondary duplication layer that the state platform itself does not generate. That local layer is where this week's clean-up is focused.

Council's records team confirmed it has prioritised 47 active DAs — those awaiting a determination or currently under public notification — for immediate remediation. The remaining affected files relate to already-determined applications and will be corrected on a rolling schedule through to 30 September 2026, according to council's internal work order timetable.

What Residents and Applicants Should Do Now

Anyone who lodged a DA or made a formal submission on a DA between January 2025 and this week is encouraged to log back into the NSW Planning Portal and verify that the documents attached to their file match the versions they originally submitted. Council's customer service centre at 2 Hely Street, Wyong — as well as the Gosford office — is taking enquiries from applicants who believe their file may have been affected.

For residents who have been tracking development applications in their street or neighbourhood, council advises downloading and cross-referencing any plans or images saved prior to the audit against the live portal record. In at least a handful of cases, documents from a different application had been inadvertently attached to a neighbouring file — a clerical consequence of the batch-import process used during the platform migration.

The clean-up comes as council continues to rebuild confidence in its administrative processes following the period of external administration that ended in mid-2021. Transparent, accurate digital records are central to the council's current improvement program, and the records team has flagged it will introduce an automated duplicate-detection script — tested last month on a sandbox environment — before the September deadline.

Residents with active applications or submissions should check their NSW Planning Portal accounts now. For direct assistance, council's planning information line operates weekdays from 8.30am to 4.30pm.