Build your floats!

B2B 2010 is less than two months away. Here’s a quick update on floats and what’s been going on behind the scenes.

First off, BUILD YOUR FLOATS!

Let us be very clear: Floats are a part of this race, and they will stay a part of this race.

Floats will be allowed to enter at the beginning of the course route and to go over the famous Hayes Street hill. We worked hard to protect this right. So please, start building.

We wanted additional float staging area(s) along the course, and race organizers are now proposing to add the Civic Center for this. We fully support this plan, which should be finalized early next week.

As always, floats will start after the runners and walkers have passed.

There will be a new registration price for float participants of $12.50-$15.00 per floater. This will be much cheaper than the regular runners’ registration. We support this plan (in fact, it was our idea last year) because it’s important for floaters to help offset expenses of the event. The registration details should be available early next week as well.

Those are the float details as we currently know them. We’ll post more as we know it.

So then what was all the hullabaloo about this year? Here’s a brief synopsis of the behind the scenes, if you’re interested:

Back in January, the race organizers announced that floats would only be allowed to enter the course at Divisadero and that they would be routed off 1.2 miles later at Arguello. We at CPBB considered this an unnecessary and unjustified restriction on floats, equivalent to banning them from about 85% of the course. We were also very concerned that this was another step in the race organizers’ long-term plan to sterilize Bay to Breakers.

We began discussions with the race organizers immediately after their January announcement. To their credit, the organizers were forthright and willing to work with us. They expressed concerns about the costs of operating B2B (a fair point and the reason why CPBB encourages every participant to register). We said that floats have been and should continue to be full participants in this event. The Panhandle resident/merchant groups were concerned about staging floats in a neighborhood on Divis, rather than a commercial area at the start, or an open area like the Civic Center. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, the patron saint of B2B, helped us all broker a resolution—again.

 Race organizers ultimately agreed to restore the floats’ status, staging them at the course start and adding another entrance along the route (something we were pushing for last year). We are very thankful to them, to Supervisor Mirkarimi and his aides, the Mayor’s office, and of course the neighbors and neighborhood groups along the route for working to make B2B 2010 a success. We hope the agreements we have reached this year will endure, and that our concerns about the organizers trying to sterilize B2B will prove unfounded. Either way, CPBB will be here to preserve our favorite San Francisco tradition.