Questions about over-occupancy, leases, landlords and large fines were answered by legal professionals Monday at the Maintenance Shop in the Memorial Union.

Michael Levine, a lawyer with ISU Student Legal Services, and Judy Parks, Ames assistant city attorney, discussed the legal elements of the housing ordinance. They spoke to an audience of 15, including community members, a Government of the Student Body senator and students.

The forum followed a March 4 City Council decision to suspend fines for students who complied with occupancy rules. Parks said the fine suspension will hopefully ease tensions between students and the city.

“I authorized the suspension of civil penalties until July 31,” Parks said.

“The fee will be waived if students agree on two conditions: bring their occupancy number down to three immediately and comply with the ordinance for one year.”

Levine said the problems result from the city’s failure to notify students of the ordinance before fining them.

“One of the fighting issues in this ordinance is notice,” he said. “Since the city investigated complaints, there’s no reason why, under existent ordinances, they couldn’t give notice to the students before issuing a citation.”

Gloria Betcher, academic advising coordinator for the English department, said the solution would be to inform students of the housing ordinance. She offered suggestions such as including occupancy limit information in ISU publications, such as the ISU class catalog.

“Getting the word out has to be the most important goal,” she said.

Fern Kupfer, member of the South Campustown Area Neighborhood Association, said adding occupancy information to ISU publications would be ineffective. The only solution was attaching occupancy information to the lease, said Kupfer, associate professor of English.

“All of this information about occupancy limits will get lost in a wash of information unless it is attached to the lease. If you leave it up to the property owners, it won’t work,” Kupfer said. “You can’t leave it up to the property owners to tell [the students] because they’ve already screwed the kids before.”

She said she doubted whether any action to inform students of occupancy laws would be taken at all.

“Is anyone willing to pursue this?” she asked. “Are these only ideas, or will something actually happen?”

Bradley Miller, GSB senator, responded to Kupfer’s challenge. He said GSB was taking steps toward providing students with information about housing occupancy limits.

“GSB is working on a Web site which has all the information about off-campus housing,” he said. “We’ve discussed this resolution for six months and we’ll submit the resolution before GSB this Wednesday. If it passes, we’ll submit the proposal to the Dean of Students.”

Dawn Ashbacker, mediation services manager for the Center for Creative Justice, said if difficult problems continue with students, tenants and community groups, the CCJ can intervene with dispute resolution.

“If both parties come to us, we can work to help them reach a solution. This will avoid a court resolution and save time and money,” she said.