BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A campaign to bail out Bay Area transit agencies has raised $7.3 million – boosted by labor unions, tech companies and Caltrain’s contractors.
Stanford has donated $10,000 to support the Regional Transit Measure, or RTM. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation donated $100,000, and the Service Employees International Union donated $400,000, campaign finance forms show.
Two Caltrain contractors – Hatch Associates and RSE Corporation – donated $175,000. They signed five-year contracts with Caltrain in March to help with engineering for up to $10 million.
Tech donors include Salesforce ($500,000), Meta ($250,000) Genentech ($250,000), Google ($150,000) and Uber ($100,000).
TransitAmerica Services, which has a contract to operate Caltrain for $138 million per year, pitched in $250,000.
BART’s contractors are also involved, such as Hitachi Rail donating $100,000. Hitachi signed a $798 million contract to replace BART’s train control system in January 2025.
The Golden State Warriors donated $75,000, and the San Francisco Giants donated $50,000, campaign finance forms show.
RTM would raise the sales tax by 0.5% in four Bay Area counties and 1% in San Francisco. The tax would last 14 years and raise an estimated $1 billion per year.
Caltrain and BART are trying to recover from a drop in riders since the start of the pandemic. Caltrain went from getting 72% of its revenue from fares in 2019 to 33% this year, resulting in a $75 million annual deficit.
Caltrain is warning of 10 station closures, no weekend service and an eventual shutdown if RTM fails to get majority support.
Big tech’s contributions to this pale in comparison to the millions they’re contributing to defeat the “tax the rich” proposition even though their workers heavily use public transit.