After receiving an annual report about resident opinions, city officials said relations between students and nonstudent residents are a main concern for Ames.

Clare Bills, public relations officer for Ames, presented the report to the Ames City Council Tuesday. At the meeting she told the council the city’s “number one issue” is its relationship with ISU students.

Relations between students and nonstudent residents have become “strained over the last year,” Bills said.

Mayor Ted Tedesco said the survey is used to review public opinion on city services.

“It’s a gauge to see how the [residents are] feeling about the services being provided by the city,” he said.

The survey was sent out to 510 residents, including both students and nonstudent residents, and 185 were returned. The data was run by the Statistics Lab at Iowa State.

Comments from respondents were also accepted and every comment received was included at the end of the survey report, Bills said.

Regarding overoccupancy, the survey asked residents if they would like to see a change on enforcement of the ordinance. Twenty-three percent of respondents would like to see greater enforcement, while 41 percent would like to see it not change and 37 percent would like less enforcement of the ordinance.

Bills said this is the first year overoccupancy enforcement has been on the survey since it has not been an issue for the city in the past.

“In the comment section, it is very obvious a number of people feel angry about decisions on the overoccupancy ordinance put into place over the last year,” she said.

Comments received by the city were mostly negative on issues like the overoccupancy ordinance, which allows only three unrelated people to live in certain areas of the city.

Tedesco said the city has “known all along” there would be comments on the occupancy restriction in the survey results.

“I am rather peeved, to say the least, at the actions of the current City Council to enforce over-occupancy limits midsemester without proper warning,” wrote one respondent of the survey. “The council better pray that they haven’t finally ticked students off enough to get them to vote.”

However, not all respondents dislike the occupancy ordinance. Of the nine comments related directly to students and the over-occupancy ordinance, only one was a positive reflection on the law.

“Please enforce number of unrelated occupants in a house in a residential subdivision and control car parking. And, please don’t promote any more ‘villages.’ People expect high concentrations of people in the cities in the East and West, not in Iowa,” the respondent wrote.