Chicago festival season is starting. What about security?

Chicago does not appear to have substantially expanded safety protocols for its busy calendar of events and festivals this summer, despite deadly attacks this year in New Orleans and Vancouver and calls from at least one alderman to bolster protections for big gatherings.

Chicago’s summer festival season effectively kicks off this weekend with Sueños, the Latin music festival, which draws tens of thousands of people to Grant Park over two days. The summer’s lineup also includes other large downtown events like Lollapalooza, NASCAR’s street race and Chicago Blues Festival, plus neighborhood street fests across the city, which have already begun.

Fifteenth Ward Ald. Raymond Lopez said the city is not prepared to keep large-scale events safe. He first raised concerns about event security at a February meeting of the City Council’s cultural committee. In the wake of the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, when a motorist plowed a truck through crowds on the famed Bourbon Street, Lopez called on the city to strengthen security requirements.

Reached this week, he said that discussion did not go anywhere.

“As we go into the high season of public events throughout the city of Chicago, we are no better prepared than we were a year ago in keeping people safe, which should make all of us very, very concerned,” Lopez said.

But Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office says the city is ready for the influx of visitors, which events like Sueños attract.

The city handles event permitting across a number of agencies, including the Chicago Police Department, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and the Chicago Park District. A city spokesperson said in a statement that the police department and OEMC work closely with local, state and federal agencies to secure events and ensure that “sufficient resources are deployed.” The statement also said safety is a top priority.

However, the spokesperson did not address questions about basic guidelines for big public events this year and whether the city was getting more resources from the federal government in light of the New Orleans attack. Over the course of three weeks, follow-up questions about event security to various city agencies were redirected in a game of hot potato. Interview requests sent to the mayor’s office and OEMC were not granted.

At least one private security professional with ample City Hall experience said he feels assured Chicago is ready to safely play host to another robust festival season.

“On all accounts that I’m aware of, I’m pretty confident and comfortable that it’s going to be a good year this year, and I look forward to all the visitors coming to Chicago,” said Rich Guidice, Johnson’s former chief of staff and the one-time head of OEMC, who now works at Blue Star Security.

No set formula for security plans

Some event organizers expected more stringent security guidelines from the city this year but said clear-cut new requirements never arrived. Security is one of the most expensive aspects of putting on an event — increasing as much as 30% in just three years, according to some local estimates — but it’s not a place where organizers are looking to skimp.

“The cost is something we can’t go around. It’s not like we get to decide, like, ‘Oh, we’ll just have less security,’ ” said Pamela Maass, executive director of the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce, who helped organize a coalition of street festival operators this year. “Obviously, the police don’t sign off on our permits until they feel like everything we’ve done to prepare for the festival is adequate.”

On the coalition’s list of concerns: rising security costs, which Maass said are the second-highest expense for Wicker Park Fest.

How much security an event must design into its plans depends on factors such as where it happens and how many people it attracts. When an organizer submits a permit request to hold a gathering, it must be given the green light by at least a handful of city agencies, each looking to make sure different requirements are met. (The special events permit application asks everything from an organizer’s plan to check IDs when serving alcohol to the number of private security personnel on-site for each shift.)

Events such as Sueños, which are held on park district property and draw daily crowds of 10,000 people or more, must provide a security plan — and foot the bill for private security — in order to receive a permit.

Sueños co-founder Aaron Ampudia told WBEZ that the festival was not required to add additional security measures this year and will stick to the game plan that has worked in the past.

“Every year, we bring and provide the top safety measures and planning to the festivals. So we’re repeating that,” Ampudia said. “We obviously learn a couple things. Maybe there’s little details, like an entrance was a little bit slow last year, so we make it way bigger so that it flows better for fan experience. But other than that, it’s pretty much the same.”

For city-sponsored events like the Chicago Blues Festival, the city’s cultural affairs department “has a budget for private security,” according to the mayor’s office.

Street festival organizers say it’s a common misconception that Chicago police provide security for their events. Instead, most security is handled with private contractors, but the police department does sign off on the permit. Security standards depend on the police district’s commander and can vary from festival to festival.

“There’s no formula,” said Geoffrey Miller, who owns Criterion Productions, which helps orchestrate a number of street festivals, including Wicker Park Fest and Do Division. “It’s really dependent upon what the commander feels is necessary in any given district, and even within a district, that can change when the commander turns over.”

To some degree, Miller says the district-by-district approach to security planning makes sense. It allows for a festival to make security plans that account for variables such as the talent lineup, like whether a band tends to draw a rowdy crowd. Miller points out that an event like the July craft beer event Ravenswood on Tap is geared toward “beer snobs” who are “there to geek out about beer and have a couple of drinks and go home.”

Put simply, some events require less personnel to keep them safe, compared to large festivals in high-traffic areas, like Wicker Park Fest, which Miller said requires “a small army of security guards.”

Still, more standard baseline security protocols would be nice, organizers said.

“Basically, for all the talk about ‘We must do something,’ it ended up being: ‘We’re just going to stick with the advice that we’ve given you in the past,’ ” Miller said.

An “impossible” high-stakes task

The city does have certain event requirements, from bag checks at the gate — aimed at filtering out everything from firearms to pepper spray and aerosols — to barricades that block closed-off streets.

Anyone who has wandered through a street festival in their neighborhood is probably used to seeing Type III barricades. Those are the orange-and-white, three-rung barriers that are often spotted near construction sites and are required by the city for any street closure.

A couple of years back, the city also started recommending that event organizers bolster the barrier, Miller said, with anything from a parked car to using a water wall (big orange barriers filled with hundreds of gallons of water). That second layer is meant to prevent or mitigate vehicle attacks.

Miller’s team is planning on adding “Jersey walls” — concrete barriers, which are among the options advised by the city — into the mix this year, in order to “have a more aggressive posture.” But adding more security measures also makes it harder for police and fire officers to access a site when there’s an emergency. (The City Council proposed a plan Wednesday to surround Wrigley Field with $30 million in concrete “anti-terrorism-rated removable bollards.”)

“We’re told we need to barricade off the entrance points, but you also have to allow immediate access for EMTs or the fire department,” Miller said. “You’re asking us to do the impossible.”

Guidice, the City Hall veteran who now works at Blue Star Security, said possible vehicular attacks have long been on the city’s radar, ever since a 2016 attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

“We’ve had that on the top of our mind and have intertwined it with our planning,” he said. “I think yes, we’ve definitely been ahead of it. We’ve definitely prepared for it.”

Employing tools like Jersey walls or steel crash barriers comes at a cost. Maass, with Save Our Street Fests, said she’d like to see festivals share resources — and to perhaps borrow barricades that the city already owns.

Lopez said that’s a system he’d like to see as well, but that City Hall is “just refusing to think outside the box” on ways to boost security.

“And unfortunately, we’ve seen where those lapses have cost people’s lives,” he said.

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.