In 2009, when BART proposed the construction of a connector to the Oakland International Airport, Public Advocates filed a civil rights and environmental justice administrative complaint with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). The complaint challenged BART’s plan to spend over $500 million on a 3.2 mile extension of BART service from the Coliseum station to the Oakland airport, replacing an existing bus line and doubling the cost of transportation for low income workers who depend on the bus service. Three San Francisco Bay Area organizations brought this complaint against the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (“BART”) under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Executive Order 12898, and related provisions. The organizations, Urban Habitat, Transform and Genesis were represented by Public Advocates’ Guillermo Mayer and Richard Marcantonio. Finding that BART had not appropriately studied the project’s impact on low-income and minority residents, in an unprecedented action the FTA ordered that $70 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds be taken away from the planned expansion and redistributed to other transit agencies for the preservation of existing service.