The Story of MITS

This research is based on going through the records of council meetings of the present term, checking on factual matters with council officers and other officials and interviewing all councillors willing to cooperate. This is only the first version of the report, and it is published to coincide with the beginning of the postal voting period of the 2020 council election. Some of it is necessarily surmise. Some of it will be wrong. Publishing the first version may encourage more input, correcting errors and filling in information gaps.

I meant to be objective about facts and objective about opinions but here and there, if you find something that is more opinion (about opinions or facts) than fact, please supply a contrary opinion and we can flag the point as debatable.

Summary

To begin with the conclusions, tentative as they are, the Moreland Integrated Transport Strategy (MITS) project stands out as a notable failure of the present council term. The result is wasted time and money and likely missed opportunities. MITS was misconceived in some ways but not fatally so and even now a satisfactory resolution might be possible but it may not be possible for this council or the next to grasp it. That is how it looks. The evidence is that ALP councillors torpedoed MITS for their own purposes and Greens councillors bailed out as public opinion turned unfavourable. There is no particular conclusion to be drawn about independent councillors but the MITS was a collective project and a collective failure. However these conclusions are entirely tentative. They are based on limited investigation and limited contributions from participants. This is not meant to be the end of the story. It is meant to challenge participants to contribute corrections, supplementary information.