City officials visited Student Government during its meeting Wednesday evening to discuss the proposed ordinance regarding rental occupancy making its way through the city council and to clear any misconceptions the senate may have on the issue.

Ahead of fall break, Student Government created a petition to be sent to the Ames City Council regarding the proposed ordinance saying that it was “purposely designed to discriminate against students.”

Concerns Student Government had on the proposed ordinance regarded the city council’s proposal to tie the number of renters to the number of parking space and capping the number of renters per house to five.

Currently, Ames has an ordinance in place that restricts the occupancy of a rental house to three non-familial individuals. On Jan. 1, 2018, however, the city’s current ordinance will no longer be in compliance with the state after the Iowa Legislature passed a law stating that rental housing cannot be restricted on familial status.

The city has been working for the past several months to draft an ordinance regarding rental occupancy in single-family low density neighborhoods.

“We appreciate getting invited tonight because there has been a good deal of misinformation going around of some actions taken by the city council which have been predicated by actions taken earlier by the Iowa Legislature,” Ames Mayor Ann Campbell said.

However, city officials feel that the proposed ordinance will better benefit students than discriminate against them.

“When we were first approached by some of the neighborhood associations, their desire was to limit occupancy to three-unrelated adults. Flat. No more,” Steve Schainker, city manager, said. “It’s going to be better than it is today. That’s because they [the council] didn’t take the side of the one group that came in.”

The ordinance, which the council is hoping to pass in advance of the looming Jan. 1, 2018 deadline, will most likely be introduced at their next meeting on Dec. 12.

Provisions of the ordinance currently include:

• To use the city assessor’s bedroom count as the baseline for the number of bedrooms in a rental house; or the numbers established through the most recent rental inspection—whichever is most recent.
• To adopt a limit of three people for one and two bedroom homes; and to have three, four and five bedroom homes equal to the number of adult occupants
• One, two and three bedroom rental houses are required to have two off-street parking spaces, whereas four or above rental houses must have the number of off-parking spaces equal to the number of bedrooms
• To cap rental housing occupancy at five adults

Questions fielded to city officials from the Student Government related to how the city plans on determining the number of bedrooms in a rental house, how the city came to its decision relating to parking spaces and why the ordinance even needs to exist. 

“[It’s to] maintain a blend that makes it a community in which we all want to live,” Campbell said.

Vice President Cody Smith said Campbell and Schainker were invited to speak at Student Government on the ordinance because the senate was wrong to send out the petition in which more than 3,000 students signed.

“Obviously we were misinformed and I take full responsibility for that,” Smith said.