After a drawn out battle, a coalition of protesters is poised to get a legal permit from the city to march against the NATO summit on May 20.

Joe Iosbaker, an organizer at the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda, or CANG8, says that the Chicago Department of Transportation has conditionally agreed to a proposal by CANG8 to start a march May 20 at the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park and end at the McCormick Place convention center, the site of the two-day NATO summit.

The condition is that CANG8 must provide more detailed information about how they plan to use the Petrillo Band Shell, according to Iosbaker. But he is confident CANG8 will satisfy city conditions.

“This is a victory,” Iosbaker says. “We can finally start planning, and issuing leaflets. We can finally put a new location on our Web site.”

It is not a complete victory, though, for CANG8. Iosbaker says that the city will not make a commitment to defend their protest route if the U.S. Secret Service were to later judge the route a security hazard. The federal government is not part of negotiations between the city and CANG8 over the protest route.

In January, the city granted CANG8 a permit to march against the G8 summit from Daley Plaza to McCormick Place on May 19. But the G8 summit was relocated from Chicago to Camp David. So CANG8 filed a parade permit application for May 20, the first day of the two-day NATO summit.

The city denied that permit, citing motorcade traffic from the 50 heads of state that will attend the summit. An Administrative Law Judge upheld the permit denial last Thursday, spurring CANG8 to resume negotiations with the city.