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Years of administrative upheaval, patchy digitisation projects and a council only recently out of financial administration have left the region's planning and asset records riddled with duplicate and mismatched imagery.
Central Coast Council is working through a backlog of duplicate and inconsistent digital images embedded across its planning portal, asset management system and public-facing property records — a problem that traces directly back to the chaotic period between 2020 and 2023 when the council was placed under NSW Government administration and its IT systems were left in a state of contested ownership.
The issue matters now because the council is mid-way through two major initiatives that depend on clean, reliable digital records. The Gosford City Centre revitalisation program, which targets the precinct between Mann Street and Donnison Street, requires accurate cadastral imagery and heritage overlays for development assessment. Separately, council's housing strategy — designed partly to capture demand from Sydney commuters priced out of the northern suburbs — involves rezoning proposals where duplicate or incorrect site photography has already caused at least one assessment delay, according to council meeting agenda documents published this year.
The roots of the problem go back to 2019 and 2020, when Central Coast Council — formed only in 2016 from the merger of Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council — was still knitting together two entirely separate records systems. The merger had produced duplicated property files almost by design: Gosford's legacy Civica system and Wyong's TechnologyOne platform each held their own photo libraries, and the integration work was never fully completed before the council's financial crisis hit.
In October 2020, NSW Local Government Minister Shelley Hancock appointed administrator Rik Hart to take over the council after it revealed a projected cash shortfall of around $89 million — a figure confirmed in the NSW Government's own public statements at the time. During the administration period, which ran until the election of a new council in December 2021, routine data governance work largely stopped. Staff reductions meant the GIS and records teams were operating at reduced capacity across both the Gosford and Wyong administration centres.
By the time elected councillors returned, the digital asset library — which includes aerial photography, site inspection images, flood mapping overlays and DA-related photographs stored on council's internal SharePoint environment — contained an estimated several thousand duplicate or conflicting image files, based on a scope assessment referenced in council's 2023-24 Integrated Planning and Reporting documents. Those documents do not specify a precise count, but describe the deduplication task as a multi-year remediation program.
Two pressures are forcing the issue into the open in mid-2026. First, the council's planning portal upgrade — part of a broader NSW Government push to modernise development application lodgement under the Planning Portal system operated by the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure — requires image metadata to conform to new standards by the end of this calendar year. Second, record heat across the state this June, which the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed was the hottest June for Sydney since 1859, has intensified scrutiny of council's flood mapping and climate resilience layers. Those layers rely on the same underlying image database.
Residents using the council's online DA tracker for properties along Terrigal Drive, in the Wamberal coastal zone or around the Tuggerah employment precinct have encountered broken image links or mismatched site photos — a symptom of the underlying duplication rather than a separate technical failure.
Council has not publicly detailed a completion date for the remediation work, but its current Digital Transformation Roadmap, tabled at the March 2026 ordinary meeting, identifies duplicate image resolution as a priority deliverable within the 2025-27 program. Residents with active development applications or property inquiries are advised to contact the council's customer service centre at 1300 463 954 or attend one of the walk-in planning counters at 2 Hely Street, Wyong or 49 Mann Street, Gosford to verify that any images attached to their files are current and correctly linked before lodging formal submissions.
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Published by The Daily Central Coast