How Central Coast Council's Planning Portal Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — and What It Cost Ratepayers to Fix It

Central Coast Council's online development application portal contains thousands of duplicate property images — some files appearing as many as four times — the result of at least three separate data migration events between 2019 and 2024 that were never properly reconciled. The council confirmed in its 2024–25 Annual Information Technology Review that a remediation project was underway, though it declined to put a completion date on the work.

The timing matters. With Gosford CBD's revitalisation accelerating — including the $80 million Gosford Waterfront precinct works and the Central Coast Conservatorium's planned relocation to Mann Street — accurate, clean digital records underpin every development application, heritage overlay check and flood-risk assessment that planners process daily. Bloated, duplicated image libraries slow that system down, and slow systems cost time that small applicants and major developers alike pay for in consultant hours.

How the Problem Compounded Over Five Years

The story begins in October 2019, when the council — then still operating as the merged entity that absorbed Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council in 2016 — migrated from two legacy content management systems into a single Objective ECM platform. The migration deadline was tight. Staff from the former Wyong administration building on Hely Street and the Gosford administration centre on Watt Street were working to a government-mandated consolidation timetable, and quality-control checks on the image library were deferred.

Then came administration. The NSW Government placed Central Coast Council under administration in October 2020 after the council ran out of money, burning through restricted reserves to fund operations. Administrator Rik Hart, later joined by Brendan Robson, oversaw a brutal financial recovery that cut services and staff. The IT remediation work that might have caught the duplicate-image problem was shelved. The council at the time was focused on a $565 million debt restructure, not file hygiene.

A second migration occurred in mid-2022 when the council moved aspects of its development application lodgement system to the NSW Planning Portal, a state-run platform. Images uploaded by applicants to the old council portal were batch-transferred to the new system. The transfer script did not include deduplication logic, and files already migrated in 2019 were migrated again. Council returned to elected representation in December 2022 after the administration period ended, but the new council inherited the IT backlog along with everything else.

A third, smaller migration in early 2024 — linked to an upgrade of council's geographic information system (GIS) used for flood mapping and zoning overlays along the Tuggerah Lakes foreshore — pushed another tranche of aerial survey imagery into the same environment. By mid-2024 the portal's image repository had grown to an estimated 2.1 terabytes, roughly double what a clean single-migration environment would have produced, according to council's own IT review document.

What It Means for the DA Queue on the Coast

The practical consequences show up in loading times on the NSW Planning Portal for properties in suburbs like Woy Woy, Terrigal and Wyong, where older cadastral image sets are particularly prone to duplication. Planners searching heritage overlays or flood-constraint maps sometimes retrieve multiple identical attachments, requiring manual checking before a determination can proceed.

The council's remediation project, run through its Digital Transformation Program, is using automated deduplication scripts alongside manual auditing for heritage-listed properties. The work is being staged, starting with Gosford and Wyong town centres where application volumes are highest. As of the council's most recent public update in May 2026, the first stage was reported as complete, with stage two — covering coastal and rural parcels — scheduled to run through to December 2026.

For residents lodging DAs or seeking property information through the council's website at Mann Street, Gosford, the immediate advice is straightforward: if a document search returns multiple identical images, flag the duplication using the portal's feedback function so it can be prioritised for manual removal. Council's customer service team at Wyong Civic Centre on Hely Street can also log the issue directly. The problem accumulated slowly over half a decade; cleaning it up, apparently, will take about the same patience.