#Kite festival portable#

Festival was a way to give back The 2019 Berkeley Kite Festival. He said he sees no way of reviving it unless the permit fees are lowered, but he’s staying hopeful. McAlister has taken the suspension of the festival as a personal failure. We’re proud of it, and it’s sad to see it go away.” “If you talk to high fliers from around the country, and even around the world, it has a reputation as one of the finest urban-type festivals. “A lot of my identity was tied up in the kite festival,” McAlister says. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLightįor McAlister, it’s a bitter end to a festival that’s been a central part of his life since his mid-20s. Mark Gonzales, 43, flies a dual line kite at César Chávez Park in Berkeley on July 16. The city looked at event fees charged by San Francisco and Oakland in creating the new permit fee structure, he said. The last time the kite festival was held, Ferris said, the city’s costs added up to about $105,000. In the end, he said, the added city event fees were simply “too much for the event to bear.”įerris said with the Marina Fund in debt by over $1 million this year, the city can no longer “afford to subsidize private special events” like the kite festival or the annual Fourth of July event, which was also canceled this year and may not return.īig events “stress Waterfront infrastructure,” including “parks, streets, parking lots, pathways, and restrooms,” and are “impactful on baseline services performed by Waterfront staff,” according to the 2019 city report on the marina fee increases. Sponsors had helped him cover his expenses in the past, but he said he was always running on slim margins and there were years where his mobile kite shop, Highline Kites, took a loss on the festival.

#Kite festival portable#

In addition to fees paid to the city, McAlister also paid out about $35,000 each year for festival costs like renting portable toilets, garbage and staffing. “While it was a great event for the community, we just can’t afford to subsidize it,” said Berkeley parks director Scott Ferris. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Highline Kites, Tom McAlister’s mobile kite shop.

While McAlister was able to use César Chávez Park for just a few thousand dollars in 2019 (including $1,000 for a special event permit), the new fees mean he would need to pay about $45,000 to offset what the city says is the cost of providing firefighters, parking attendants, custodial staff and other services for a two-day festival attended by tens of thousands. McAlister said new special event fees - approved by the city three years ago to help offset the debt crisis facing the Berkeley Marina - will more than double his total cost of hosting the festival.

This year the festival won’t happen due to a different reason. In 20, the festival was put on pause due to the pandemic. Octopi in the sky at the 2014 Berkeley Kite Festival. During its prime, the festival drew in crowds of more than 30,000 with its expert sport kite demonstrations, spectacular floating creatures and performances by the Berkeley Kite Wranglers and Kite Team of Japan. It’s McAlister’s deeply held belief in the value of kiting that led him to found the beloved Berkeley Kite Festival, which ran from 1986 until 2019, always on the last weekend of July. “Kites force us to look up, both physiologically and metaphorically.” “Most of us spend our days, our work lives and play lives, looking at the horizon or looking down at our work,” he said.

Tom McAlister has sold kites out of his truck at the Berkeley Marina for more than three decades.

Tom McAlister, owner of Highline Kites and founder of the Berkeley Kite Festival, sets a kite aloft in César Chávez Park at the Berkeley Marina on July 16, 2022.