City Council members voted Wednesday to adopt a $2.3 billion operating budget that did not include funding for seven positions that Mayor Kirk Caldwell insists are crucial to providing housing for the homeless.

The contractual-hire positions, three current and four additional, would make up the administration’s new Office of Strategic Development that has unveiled affordable housing and homeless initiatives in Waianae, Chinatown and on Sand Island. Last month, Council Budget Committee members denied restor-ing funding for the admin-istration’s housing positions.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Councilman Brandon Elefante urged members to vote for an amendment he introduced that would restore the $616,000 needed for the homeless-housing positions. But the amendment failed to gain Council approval.

Council members, however, approved $130,000 in funding for two positions to hire homeless-housing experts for the Council staff.

Elefante introduced another amendment Wednesday, which also failed to gain approval, that would have eliminated those two Council housing positions.

“We’re a legislative body and we focus on policy,” he told Council members. “It’s the administration that focuses on the implementation of it.”

Caldwell said after the vote that he was “really hopeful that perhaps they (Council members) would come to their senses” and find a way to fund the positions.

“We have shown … when we hired the first of the three folks we have right now that we can make a difference,” Caldwell said. “There’s no way these things would have happened as quickly as they did without them.”

The move to not include funding for the administration’s seven positions comes in the wake of Council members voting 6-3 at Wednesday’s meeting to override Caldwell’s veto of a bill expanding the contentious law that bans sitting or lying down on public sidewalks.

Caldwell added that the administration will seek alternatives to keep the staff and possibly find other ways to fund the additional positions, pointing out that the development office’s employees have a “unique skill set” that focuses on affordable housing.

“We are just taking off. We just left the runway,” he said. “They (the public) want to see more homeless housed and not on our streets and not being moved further and further into other neighborhoods.”

But Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi said the administration could find other ways to fund the positions, pointing out that Caldwell used leftover funds to create the office. She added that members have nothing against the development office.

“We’re trying not to grow government,” she said. “People in Hawaii do live within their resources they have. And government should do the same thing. We should work with the resources we have.”

Council members also adopted a $570 million budget for capital improvement projects and voted to maintain the real property tax rate for the upcoming fiscal year at $6 per $1,000 valuation for homes that are valued at $1 million or more, which is aimed at absentee owners. That rate is about 75 percent more than the standard $3.50 rate that applies to owner-occupied dwellings.