The council has published what it will crack down on until 2029. Submissions closed on 21 August

Most council consultations ask what you want built. This one asks what you want policed, which is rarer and arguably more useful, because it is the council telling you in advance where its compliance officers will be spending their attention.

The draft statement sets out five priorities a year for three years. Council says the list was informed by community feedback from the 2024/25 engagement program combined with its own data and experience, and that the priority areas will receive increased oversight, and an increased regulatory response may be applied.

The fifteen, year by year

The distinction that decides what this list actually means

Read quickly, the table says the council will not deal with illegal dumping until 2028. That reading is wrong, and the statement says so itself. The yearly priorities exist in addition to our enduring priorities, which council describes as the regulatory functions we are committed to upholding on an ongoing basis.

Those enduring priorities are parking accessibility, community safety including dog attacks and leashing and registration, non-compliance with lawful directions and orders, protecting public assets and the environment, and illegal camping compliance.

Which produces the clearest proof of the point: illegal camping appears in both lists. It is an enduring priority now and a yearly priority in 2028-29. Being named for a year does not mean enforcement starts then. It means that year gets the extra attention.

What is worth saying in a submission

The useful question is not whether these are real problems. All fifteen plainly are. It is whether the sequence is right, because the sequence is the only thing the yearly list actually decides, and it is the thing a submission can move.

Two orderings stand out to us. Unauthorised coastal works sits in 2027-28, on a coastline where seawall applications at Wamberal are live now and the council’s Open Coast Coastal Management Program was certified in June 2026. And erosion and sediment control, which is the everyday building-site version of the same problem, sits in the last year of three.

That is an observation about ordering, not a criticism of anyone’s conduct. Both matters are already covered by the enduring priority of protecting public assets and the environment, and a council has finite officers and has to sequence something last. But if you think the Coast’s erosion exposure argues for moving either forward, this consultation was the mechanism that existed for saying so. It closed on 21 August 2026.

Equally, if you run a business the list is worth reading as a diary. Outdoor dining compliance and Gosford CBD parking are this year. High risk food and public health premises and food truck and stall compliance are in the two years after. A cafe with footpath seating and a permit it has not checked recently now knows when to check it.

How to have a say

Submissions can be made through the online form on the council’s Your Voice Our Coast exhibition page, by email, or by post to PO Box 20, Wyong NSW 2259. The page also carries the draft statement itself and a set of FAQs. The exhibition page carried the closing date of Friday 21 August 2026 when we read it on 4 August 2026; that line has since been removed from the page, which is what closing a consultation looks like.

One thing worth knowing before you write: council’s privacy notice on that page says feedback may also be de-identified and published in reports, and that anonymous feedback means it cannot come back to you with questions.

What the consultation found

The council published an engagement summary for this exhibition in September 2026. It received 41 submissions, and 39 people answered the priority ratings in its survey. Several of the most popular items are the furthest away. Illegal dumping, scheduled for 2028-29, was the highest rated overall, with 84.6 per cent calling it important or very important. Unauthorised coastal works, smoke and air pollution, and high-risk food and public health premises, all scheduled for 2027-28, had 66.7 per cent each. Outdoor dining compliance, one of this year’s five, had 12.8 per cent, and food truck and stall compliance 20.5 per cent. The summary records that some respondents wanted coastal works, public health and erosion and sediment control brought forward.

It was not the first time. The council’s consultation on its 2025-26 statement, held in May and June 2025, found illegal waste dumping most consistently rated as very important (77%). That consultation ran in the 2024/25 financial year. The draft does not say which engagement it means, but this summary, published in August 2025, is the only published account of feedback from that period we have found. We should have read it before writing that the working behind this ranking was not published. It reports the feedback but not how the council weighed it, and that part is still not published.

The council’s response, in the September summary, does not say any priority will move between years. It says the final decision rests with councillors at a formal meeting, and that once the statement is endorsed, progress on each priority will be reported to Council quarterly.

What the committee recommended

On 6 October 2026 the council’s Environment and Planning Committee recommended that Council endorse the statement. The motion carried five votes to two (resolution EPC-26/240). The statement attached to the committee report is still headed draft, and we compared it line by line with the version exhibited from 24 July: apart from page headers, the text is the same. No priority has moved between years, and illegal dumping stays in 2028-29. The report repeats the survey results, with illegal dumping first. It says the draft was amended to add a clause on illegal camping under an earlier committee resolution; that clause was already in the exhibited version.

The committee added to its recommendation. It asked that Council urgently install signs banning overnight car parking at named spots including Toowoon Bay and the Gosford Waterfront, and that a report with any available data on the scope of the issues go to the Community and Culture Committee. The decision is Council’s. We found no Council meeting between 6 and 21 October, and its next ordinary meeting was on Tuesday 27 October 2026.

Our view, labelled as such: a council that has twice asked residents and twice heard illegal dumping first should explain, in the final statement, why its year of extra attention waits until 2028-29. The version recommended on 6 October does not explain it. That is a question about emphasis, not neglect: the enduring priority of protecting public assets and the environment is broad, though it does not name dumping, and the council says issues outside the yearly list will still be addressed.

Updated 28 October 2026. Council’s ordinary meeting on 27 October has been held, and the two sentences on it are now in the past tense. Its minutes are not yet published; we will say from them what it decided on the statement. Nothing else has changed.

Updated 21 October 2026. We wrote that as at 19 October we had not found an adopted version. The statement is still not adopted, but on 6 October a council committee recommended that Council endorse the statement as exhibited (adding requests on overnight parking signs), and we had missed that. We have added a section on the committee’s recommendation, compared the recommended statement with the exhibited draft, noted in our view that the recommended version still does not explain the 2028-29 timing for dumping, updated the line under the headline, and added two sources. The methodology note said we had not read the full draft statement; we have now read it, and the table matches it. We also corrected a sentence that still said the consultation was open, which the update of 23 August should have caught.

Updated 19 October 2026. We wrote that we had not seen how the 2024/25 engagement feedback fed into the ranking, because that working is not published. The weighting is still not published, but the council’s summary of its 2025 consultation was, in August 2025, and it rated illegal dumping first. We have added a section on it and on the council’s September 2026 summary of this exhibition, revised the methodology note and the line under the headline, noted that we have not found an adopted version, and added two sources.

Updated 23 August 2026. Submissions on the draft statement closed on 21 August 2026, so this page no longer says they are open. The council’s exhibition page has since dropped its closing-date line, so that sentence is now recorded as what we read on 4 August rather than quoted as current. The substance, the fifteen priorities and the distinction underneath them, is unchanged.

Run a business on the Coast, or read these priorities differently? Ask for a correction. Corrections are published, dated and left visible.