Campaigners on both sides of San Jose's Measure B, which if passed would bring Bay Area Rapid Transit to the South Bay, have remained hopeful today as Tuesday's election results are too close to call and more than 150,000 ballots remain to be counted as of Thursday.
The 16.1-mile BART expansion project would run from Fremont to Santa Clara and add six stops to the line. The $6.1 billion project would also connect BART with Caltrain, the Altamont Commuter Express, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority lines and Amtrak.
Measure B proposes a one-eighth-cent sales tax increase to fund the expansion, which comes out to around $13 a year per resident, proponents said.
If the measure passes, the tax will only be collected if state and federal funding is in place. The tax would be in effect for 30 years and construction would begin in 2013 and end in 2017, according to the county.
Measure B Campaign spokesman Phil Yost said Thursday that votes in support of the measure, which requires two-thirds approval to pass, have been coming in more favorably as ballot counting continues.
"We have crept up a little bit each time they have released a new count," he said.
Yost said initial returns indicated about 65.6 percent of absentee voters voted in favor of Measure B. When more results were released Wednesday morning, about 67.7 percent of voters had approved the measure, bumping the average percentage to about 66.27, according to Yost.
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Continued elections returns have bumped the percent of voters in favor of Measure B up to about 66.3 percent, where the results stood this afternoon.
"There is an indication that these ballots that remain to be counted will be slightly more positive than the previous ones," Yost said. "They don't have to be wildly more positive for us, but we think if they are 67.9 percent for us we will get to our two-thirds."
Measure B campaigners expected the race to be tight, according to Yost.
"We knew that in this economy we were unlikely to have that kind of margin," he said. "We always figured it would be pretty close."
