Mayor Kirk Caldwell tried a soft-sell approach with City Council members Tuesday in his latest attempt to gain funding for a proposed eight-person housing development division.

Speaking during a rare, unannounced appearance before the Council’s Public Health, Safety and Welfare Committee, Caldwell acknowledged differences with Council members over how to address affordable housing and homelessness.

“We look at you as our partners,” Caldwell said. “I know at times we may disagree on how we get there, but I know we all have the passion to show the success that this community demands.”

In recent weeks Caldwell, Council Chairman Ernie Martin and his Council colleagues have been criticized by the media and others for having a contentious relationship so mired in political gamesmanship that it has hampered the city’s ability to address pressing issues.

“Despite how (the Honolulu Star-Advertiser) wants to write (how) our relationship is, I think we’ve produced some incredible results,” Caldwell said, adding that approximately 800 chronically homeless people, 600 of them military veterans, found permanent and supportive housing last year.

“That is a success that we could not have done without you working with us,” the mayor said.

After citing other modest successes in putting up affordable housing with the Council’s help, Caldwell reiterated his administration’s pitch for $477,690 to fund the planned Asset Development and Management Division within the Department of Community Services.

In April 2015 the Council Budget Committee knifed out all proposed funding for the division, but the final version of the city’s $2.3 billion operating budget won’t be approved until June.

“Please keep an open mind about funding some part of this,” Caldwell said. “Yes, I would love to see eight positions funded. If we don’t want to make them civil service, they could even be contract, but give us the chance to show what we can do with a full complement of folks.”

None of the roughly 9,000 people now employed by the city are “the kind of people that we need to actually go out and purchase units, close deals, do the due diligence, do the construction and then work with the providers to get people in there,” he said. “It is a complicated, difficult task, and we’ve been working very hard.”

Last year the Council refused to fund a two-person Office of Strategic Development, but the administration was able to cobble funding for it from vacant positions. The plan for next year was to merge those two positions with the new housing development division.

“Help us do this, we’re in this together,” the mayor said, pointing out that the Legislature this week moved toward giving Gov. David Ige more money than he had budgeted to address housing and homelessness.

Public Health, Safety and Welfare Committee members sat stoically during most of Caldwell’s 15-minute pitch, and no one raised questions when its chairman, Ron Menor, called for them.

After the meeting, Council Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi said she was unswayed. “He gave a good pitch, but it’s the same as he gave last year.”

The administration continues to send mixed signals about how it wants to proceed with its housing plans, she said.

She said she fails to see the need for a new agency when the city could reach out to local real estate agents, developers or others with housing expertise. “But when we hire people, we have to pay for salaries, an office, benefits, a computer and a telephone. We shouldn’t keep just growing government.”

After Caldwell’s visit to the committee, Community Services Director Gary Nakata and Office of Strategic Development Chief Sandra Pfund gave an update on the administration’s housing and homelessness initiatives that offered few new details.

Pfund’s agency is now developing five low-income housing projects — two each in Chinatown and Waianae, and one in Makiki — and is in “various phases of negotiation” for seven other properties, including two in Iwilei that might be announced soon. That’s in addition to the Sand Island project, Hale Mauliola, which is now 70 percent occupied, Nakata said.