The stairs at Blue Lagoon Beach, between Bateau Bay Road and the sand, reopened this month. Council’s announcement on 14 August puts the total project cost at approximately $650,000, delivered with $245,000 from the Crown Reserves Improvement Fund “in partnership with Central Coast Council”. On those two figures, the council carried about $405,000, or roughly 62 per cent of the job. That is our arithmetic from council’s own numbers, not a figure council published.
The new stairs are concrete, fibre reinforced polymer and stainless steel, which council says was chosen after coastal engineering so they withstand erosion and severe weather. The neighbouring public toilets have been repainted and reopened. Mayor Lawrie McKinna and the Member for The Entrance, David Mehan, both spoke at the opening, and Mr Mehan credited the advocacy of the Save Our Stairs Committee.
That is the announcement. The more useful question is what the fund behind it actually does for this region, and that is answerable, because NSW Crown Lands publishes a spreadsheet of every approved project in every round. We downloaded three of them.
What the fund is
The Crown Reserves Improvement Fund pays for maintenance, improvement and development on NSW Crown reserves. Reading the 2025-26 round guidelines end to end, three features matter for understanding a project like the Blue Lagoon stairs.
It is competitive and annual, with a stated program value of $13.5 million and general grants running from $50,000 to a ceiling of $1,000,000. It is scored on three criteria: reserve usage at 40 per cent, where higher visitation scores higher; community impact at 40 per cent, which explicitly includes “maintaining or increasing public access, amenity and use of the reserve”; and deliverability and affordability at 20 per cent, which counts any co-contribution the applicant brings.
And it is for capital work only. The guidelines state twice that “day to day operational maintenance items and administration costs” are not eligible. Hold that thought.
What the Coast has actually received
Every grant recorded against the Central Coast local government area across the three published rounds, with the applicant named, because the distinction turns out to matter.
| Round | Reserve and project | Applicant | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-24 | Bateau Bay Road Reserve: stair replacement to access foreshore reserve | Central Coast Council | $245,000 |
| 2023-24 | Central Coast Wetlands, Pioneer Dairy: internal access road upgrade | Reserve land manager | $523,262 |
| 2023-24 | Central Coast Wetlands, Pioneer Dairy: woody weed control, Tuggerah Creek | Reserve land manager | $29,975 |
| 2023-24 | Tom Mckenzie Park, Mangrove Creek: exotic weed control | Reserve land manager | $3,692 |
| 2024-25 | Central Coast Wetlands, Pioneer Dairy: weed control, Tuggerah Creek | Reserve land manager | $29,975 |
| 2025-26 | Picnic Point Reserve, The Entrance: renew seawall and accessible foreshore boardwalk | Central Coast Council | $1,000,000 |
| 2025-26 | Central Coast Wetlands, Pioneer Dairy: multipurpose hall upgrades | Reserve land manager | $156,519 |
| 2025-26 | Central Coast Wetlands, Pioneer Dairy: woody weed control, South Tacoma Road | Reserve land manager | $29,322 |
By round, the Coast took $801,929 in 2023-24, $29,975 in 2024-25, and $1,185,841 in 2025-26. Set against each round’s statewide total, that is 5.5 per cent, then 0.3 per cent, then 9.5 per cent. In 2024-25 a region of 346,596 people drew a single weed-control grant of just under $30,000 from an $11.2 million statewide round.
The second thing the table shows is who is applying. Of the eight grants, two went to Central Coast Council: the Bateau Bay stairs and the Picnic Point seawall, $1,245,000 between them. The other six, worth $772,745, went to reserve land managers other than the council, and four of those six are the one site, Central Coast Wetlands at Pioneer Dairy, which has drawn $769,053 across all three rounds. A single Crown reserve at Tuggerah has pulled in more from this fund than the council has.
One more detail from the records, worth stating because it answers a question people reasonably ask about grant programs. Each spreadsheet carries a column recording whether ministerial discretion was exercised. Across all 343 approved projects in the three rounds it is marked yes exactly once, and not on the Coast. Every Central Coast grant here is recorded as a merit assessment.
Our view, labelled as such
A beach staircase is close to the ideal shape for this fund. It is on a well-visited reserve, which is 40 per cent of the score, and its entire purpose is maintaining public access, which is named in the criteria for the other 40 per cent. Council putting in the larger share of the money helps on the remaining 20. None of that is luck, and the swing from $802,000 to $30,000 and back is not really the state’s verdict on the Coast either. It is a competitive round that pays out on applications made, so a quiet year most likely means a quiet year for applications.
Which points at the thing worth watching. This fund builds; it is barred from maintaining. In the same release announcing the stairs, council says it is “continuing discussions with key stakeholders on long-term options for the toilet block’s ongoing maintenance and operation”. That is the gap in one sentence: the state will fund a $650,000 staircase and a $1 million seawall, and it will not fund the cleaning, the inspections or the repainting that keep either of them usable in fifteen years. The stairs are built from materials chosen to last. The question the record cannot answer is who pays to look after them, and on the evidence of the toilet block next to them, that one is still open.
Methodology
Project costs and the funding split for the Blue Lagoon stairs are council’s own published figures in its 14 August 2026 announcement (Source 1), which we fetched and read in full. The council’s share of about $405,000, and the 62 per cent, are The Coast Record’s subtraction from council’s two published figures.
All grant figures come from the three approved-project spreadsheets published by NSW Crown Lands (Sources 3 to 5), which we downloaded and totalled ourselves. We selected rows where the LGA column reads Central Coast Council. Each sheet ends with its own totals row, which we excluded from all sums; as a check, our per-round project counts and totals reproduce those totals rows exactly (144 projects and $14,577,705 for 2023-24; 97 and $11,155,491.80 for 2024-25; 102 and $12,456,814 for 2025-26), and our 2025-26 general-stream figure of 17 grants worth $9,548,911 matches the summary Crown Lands publishes on its own program page. Percentages are our arithmetic. The population figure is the ABS 2021 Census count for the Central Coast LGA (Source 6); the 2026 Census was in the field this month, so that count will be superseded next year.
What we have not established. The criteria described above are those of the 2025-26 round, which funded Picnic Point. The Blue Lagoon grant sits in the 2023-24 round and we have not read that year’s guidelines, so we do not claim these exact weightings were applied to it. Nor have we established the date within 2023-24 that the grant was awarded, which means nothing here should be read as showing what prompted the application or the earlier removal of the old stairs. We have not contacted council or Crown Lands, and we would publish any response. Rounds before 2023-24 are not covered by the spreadsheets currently published, so the $2,017,745 is a three-round total, not an all-time one.