How Wollongong's planning records ended up riddled with duplicate images — and what it cost

Wollongong City Council's development assessment portal is carrying thousands of duplicate image files embedded across planning applications lodged between 2014 and 2024 — a problem that has slowed assessment times, inflated storage costs, and complicated the public's ability to search historical records for properties across the city.

The issue did not emerge overnight. It is the compounded result of at least three separate software migrations, two changes to council's document management vendor, and a period between 2017 and 2020 when scanning contractors working out of the Crown Street civic administration building were operating under protocols that did not flag identical image checksums before upload. Every time a batch of plans was scanned and ingested into the system, duplicates were carried forward rather than caught at the gate.

How the problem took root

The roots go back to 2013, when the NSW government pushed local councils to comply with the then-new Planning Portal framework, accelerating digitisation timelines across the state. Wollongong, like many regional councils, contracted out the bulk of its back-scanning work — converting paper DA files into digital records — to meet compliance deadlines. Speed was prioritised. Quality-assurance checking, particularly for image-level duplicates, was not built into early contracts.

By the time council migrated to a new content management system in 2019, the duplicate files had already been baked into tens of thousands of records. The migration process copied them across wholesale. A subsequent audit flagged the problem internally, but remediation was deferred twice — first because of resourcing constraints during the 2020 pandemic response period, then because a planned system upgrade in 2022 was expected to include automated deduplication tools that, ultimately, were not delivered in the final product rollout.

The practical impact has fallen hardest on the development assessment pipeline, which matters enormously in a city grappling with a housing shortfall. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation has repeatedly identified housing supply as a regional priority, and delays in DA processing — even marginal ones caused by bloated file systems — compound pressure on a market where median house prices in suburbs such as Fairy Meadow and Corrimal have risen sharply over the past four years.

What the backlog looks like now

Council's IT services division, working alongside its planning directorate, has been running a staged cleanup since February 2026. The work is focused first on active applications — those lodged after January 2022 — before working backwards through the archive. Properties along the Mount Ousley Road corridor and within the Kembla Grange and Dapto release areas have the highest concentration of affected records, partly because those zones saw heavy DA activity during the 2015–2019 residential construction surge.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility on Squires Way has been consulted as part of a broader data-integrity working group convened earlier this year, lending technical expertise on automated image-matching algorithms that could accelerate the deduplication process beyond what council's in-house team can manage manually.

Storage costs are a measurable consequence. Cloud archiving for council's planning records grew by roughly 34 percent between 2021 and 2025 — a figure council's own budget papers attributed in part to unmanaged file proliferation, though the duplicate-image problem was not singled out by name in public documents. Every gigabyte of redundant data carries an ongoing hosting cost that, at enterprise cloud pricing rates current in 2025, runs into tens of thousands of dollars annually across a library of this size.

For residents and property buyers, the most immediate advice is practical: when searching the NSW Planning Portal for a Wollongong address, be aware that image attachments on older DAs may appear multiple times in a document list without representing distinct documents. Cross-referencing the document title and date stamp is a more reliable method than counting files. Council's customer service team at the Burelli Street office can assist with formal records requests where the online archive is ambiguous. The full remediation program is scheduled to conclude by March 2027, after which council intends to publish a revised document management policy designed to prevent the same accumulation from recurring.