Mayfest officially announced their wristband policy for Dillo Day 2015, with some significant changes from last year's festival.
Starting this year, Northwestern students will be allowed to bring only one non-student guest. Each guest will also be required to pay a fee of $10 to enter, and Evanston residents will have to pay a higher fee of $25 to secure a wristband. Every Northwestern student is guaranteed a wristband at no cost.
The policy was enacted partially in response to a series of problems that Mayfest encountered in 2014, the first year that students needed wristbands to enter the festival grounds. Due to the construction on the Allen Center parking lot, which was previously a primary exit, NUPD implemented new capacity restrictions that limited the number of wristbands Mayfest could distribute. In order to ensure that every Northwestern student could attend the festival, Mayfest was forced to stop distribution early, and many previously registered guests were unable to secure a wristband.
"Last year was kind of the perfect storm," said Mayfest co-chair Ian Robinson. "We were implementing wristbands for the first time and trying out this new system, so everything swelled up at once. We realized we were running out of wristbands, and obviously our number one priority was making sure that Northwestern students can attend, because this event is fundamentally for them."
The $25 price for Evanston residents was designed to roughly mimic the amount that students pay every year for Dillo Day as part of the Student Activities Fee. Mayfest is subsidizing the price for student guests, allowing the fee to drop to $10.
"It seemed weird that students were already paying for it and we were letting all these other people come in for free," said Robinson. "There's no other festival where anyone can come for free at this scale. We understand that guests are part of it, so we are subsidizing it for members of the Northwestern community."
There will be a limited number of guest wristbands, and not every Northwestern student is guaranteed a guest. Mayfest plans on staggering the registration period over five days, allowing a certain number of wristbands to be claimed each day.
"We don't want it to be first come, first serve on Monday at 9 AM, because if you had class, you'd be out of luck," said Matt Gallagher, co-chair of University Relations for Mayfest. "We do fully expect that all of [the wristbands] will sell out, given last year and years past."
Like Northwestern students, Evanston residents will only be allowed to register one guest for attendance. In 2014, Evanston residents were allowed to register up to four guests, whereas students were only allowed two. Many students were upset by this, especially after many registered student guests were unable to attend, and Mayfest wanted to ensure that the policy was consistent and fair for everyone.
"We've significantly scaled back on the overall number of Evanston residents allowed in this year," said Robinson. "This is an event for Northwestern students, and there's no reason an Evanston resident should be able to bring four guests when a student can only bring one."
The new policy should smooth out the wristband distribution process, and ensure that there is no shortage of wristbands come May.
"As an organization, we recommend to the Northwestern student body that they don't have their guests make travel plans or buy plane tickets until they've secured them a wristband," said Gallagher. "They're not going to be unlimited."