How Wollongong's planning records ended up full of duplicate images — and what the council is now doing about it

Thousands of development application files held by Wollongong City Council contain duplicate images — scanned photographs, site plans and elevation drawings uploaded multiple times to the same record — a problem that council staff have confirmed is now the subject of an internal records audit. The issue affects files lodged as far back as 2009, when the council migrated to its current document management system.

The timing matters. Wollongong is processing more development applications than at almost any point in its recent history. The state government's housing supply targets, which require the Illawarra Shoalhaven region to deliver thousands of additional dwellings over the next decade, have pushed the council's planning portal to capacity. Duplicate image records slow down file retrieval, bloat server storage, and complicate the work of independent planning commissioners who review contested applications. With major projects clustered around the Northgate precinct, the Crown Street Mall redevelopment corridor, and new medium-density proposals along Corrimal Street, clean record-keeping is not a bureaucratic nicety — it has direct consequences for approval timelines.

Where the problem started

The root cause traces to two separate digitisation campaigns. The first ran between 2009 and 2013, when the council contracted an external firm to scan its paper DA archive. The second occurred in 2018, when council IT staff migrated data to an upgraded system hosted through the NSW Government's Service NSW for Business infrastructure. During that 2018 migration, automated scripts designed to transfer image files did not include deduplication logic. Files that had already been scanned and indexed were pulled across again alongside their metadata, creating duplicate entries that looked like distinct records to the system but pointed to identical images.

Planning officers working on applications in suburbs including Fairy Meadow, Figtree, and Keiraville began flagging the problem informally around 2022, according to council meeting minutes from November of that year — the earliest public record acknowledging the issue. A formal review was not commissioned until late 2024, after the council adopted its updated Digital Information Strategy, a document that set data integrity benchmarks for all council-held records through to 2028.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences has had an informal research partnership with the council on smart-city data infrastructure since 2021. That relationship brought additional scrutiny to the archives problem, as UOW researchers working on a spatial data project in 2025 encountered the duplicate records while cross-referencing council DA files with land-use mapping data held by the NSW Spatial Services directorate in Bathurst.

The practical cost and what comes next

Storage alone tells part of the story. Council's IT department estimated in a budget briefing document presented to the Infrastructure and Works Committee in March 2026 that redundant image files account for roughly 14 terabytes of the council's 38-terabyte planning archive — a proportion significant enough to justify dedicated remediation funding. The council allocated $210,000 in its 2026-27 operational plan to address the backlog, covering software licensing, contractor hours for manual verification of flagged files, and staff training.

The remediation work is being staged. Files related to active or recently determined applications — those lodged after January 2020 — are being cleaned first, with older records to follow. The council's Records and Information Management team, based at the Burelli Street administration building, is coordinating with the planning directorate to ensure no documents are deleted without a second officer sign-off, a safeguard required under the NSW State Records Act 1998.

For residents and developers with applications currently before the council, the practical advice is straightforward: if a submission includes photographic attachments or scanned drawings, use PDF format with embedded images rather than uploading separate image files. The council's portal guidance, updated in April 2026, now specifies this as the preferred method. Applicants who uploaded multiple image files in earlier submissions and want confirmation their DA file is intact can request a document register from the council's customer service centre on Kembla Street — a process that takes up to five business days under council's current service standard.

The broader lesson for a region navigating one of the most intensive periods of planning activity in a generation is that the infrastructure behind the approval process matters as much as the policies governing it. Getting the archive right now, before the Port Kembla renewable energy zone and associated industrial transition projects generate another wave of applications, is the work the council is trying to finish before that wave arrives.