How Central Coast Council's Property Records Became a Tangled Web of Duplicate Images

Central Coast Council is working through a backlog of duplicate images embedded in its property and infrastructure asset database, a problem that records management staff say traces directly to the chaos of the council's financial administration period and the rushed digitisation programs that preceded it. The cleanup is now an active line item in the council's internal IT remediation work, though no completion date has been publicly confirmed.

The issue matters now because the council is mid-way through several data-heavy planning exercises — including the Gosford CBD Revitalisation program and updated flood mapping under the Central Coast Flood Risk Management Study — both of which draw on the same asset database. Duplicate images inflate file storage, slow down retrieval systems and, in some cases, have been linked to incorrect asset condition ratings when two photographs of different assets are filed under a single record.

How the Problem Took Root

The roots go back to 2016, when the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council were merged by the NSW Government to form Central Coast Council. Two separate digital asset libraries, built on different software platforms and maintained under different naming conventions, were stitched together rather than rebuilt from scratch. The merge was completed under deadline pressure by the newly appointed administrator's office, and a full data audit was deferred.

Between 2016 and 2020, council staff and external contractors continued uploading field photographs — of stormwater drains along Dane Drive in Gosford, park infrastructure at Tuggerah Lakeside Reserve, road surfaces on the Pacific Highway corridor through Wyong — using whatever legacy system they had been trained on. Because the two original naming conventions were never harmonised, the same physical asset was often photographed and catalogued twice, once under each former council's taxonomy.

Then came the administration itself. In October 2020, the NSW Government appointed an administrator after the council disclosed a shortfall — later quantified in public documents at more than $1.5 billion in unfunded infrastructure liabilities — that left the organisation unable to meet basic financial obligations. Staff numbers were cut and several IT projects, including a planned digital asset management overhaul, were paused or abandoned entirely. The duplicate image problem, already present, was effectively locked in place for the better part of two years.

When elected councillors returned in December 2021, the new council inherited the frozen IT landscape alongside everything else. A recovery plan tabled in early 2022 prioritised financial stabilisation and the Central Coast Community Strategic Plan 2023–2033, and the database cleanup remained a lower-order priority.

Why Cleaning It Up Is Harder Than It Looks

Deduplication is not simply a matter of deleting obvious copies. Many of the duplicates are near-identical but not exact — different lighting, slightly different angles, different timestamps — which means automated deduplication tools produce a significant number of false positives. Staff have to review flagged pairs manually to confirm whether they show the same asset or two distinct ones in close proximity.

The Gosford CBD precinct, where the revitalisation program is concentrating capital works along Mann Street and the Kibble Park surrounds, has one of the highest concentrations of duplicate records. Council workers photographed the same streetscape infrastructure repeatedly as design proposals evolved and site inspections multiplied during the planning phase, and not all of those images were tagged to indicate they were planning-phase rather than as-built records.

The practical consequences are concrete. Asset condition audits that feed into the council's long-term financial plan — a document that must be refreshed annually under the NSW Office of Local Government's Integrated Planning and Reporting framework — are only as reliable as the underlying data. Incorrect or ambiguous condition ratings can shift capital works priorities and, ultimately, affect which projects get funded in any given budget cycle.

Council staff are currently using a combination of the Civica Authority platform and a supplementary image review tool to work through the backlog. Residents or community organisations with questions about specific assets — particularly those involved in flood resilience planning around Tuggerah, Wyong or the Gosford waterfront — can lodge formal access to information requests under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 to check the records held against their local area.