Honolulu’s mayor and City Council continue to butt heads over the best path forward for the city’s sit-lie ban, as the controversial policy branches out farther across the island.

On Wednesday, Council members voted 6-3 to override Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s recent veto of Bill 6. The measure expands the city’s so-called “sit-lie” ordinance,” which bans sitting and lying down on certain public sidewalks. The Council override makes the measure law.

It adds new neighborhoods such as the Kapalama Canal, Aala and McCully to the sit-lie prohibition. It also includes areas across the street from the borders of current zones.

“I’m extremely disappointed,” Caldwell said in a news briefing Wednesday after the Council’s vote. “I want bills that are strong, based solidly on legal grounding, and if there’s a challenge we know we’re going to win.”

In a previous briefing, held after his May 21 veto, Caldwell implored the Council not to override it. His office questions whether the expansion could withstand a court challenge, and it worries that Bill 6 might jeopardize the city’s entire sit-lie ordinance.

City attorneys maintain that expanding the ban beyond business areas to include other places, such as the banks of the Kapalama Canal, where homeless encampments have grown recently, could put sit-lie on shaky legal ground, Caldwell said. Sit-lie opponents, he said, could then argue that the entire effort targets the homeless.

However, the Council members who voted to override Wednesday said that they’re done debating, that more businesses and residents urgently need the expansion — and that those constituents deserve the same rights as others already covered by sit-lie.

“I think the situation at the canal is absolutely out of control,” Councilman Joey Manahan said after the vote. “Something needed to be done at this point.”

His district includes the Kapalama Canal, and he said that nearby businesses “need relief” from the situation there.

If sit-lie is challenged in court, “that is part of the process,” Manahan said, adding, “And I think we’d be able to work with the Judiciary to figure out how to better the law.”

Council members Ron Menor, Kymberly Pine and Brandon Elefante voted against the override.

Despite Caldwell’s concerns, the mayor said the city would enforce the sit-lie expansions and that it would defend the ordinance in court if necessary.

Caldwell initiated the first sit-lie ban last year, which imposed a 24-hour restriction in the Waikiki Special District. Subsequently, Council members pushed through a second bill that added more than a dozen other business zones to the sit-lie ban, a measure that the administration initially voiced concerns about but later endorsed after the office of the corporation counsel was allowed to tinker with it.

A third sit-lie bill, which added five city pedestrian malls in downtown-Chinatown to the ordinance, was also endorsed by the administration only after city attorneys made some changes to it.

Opponents of sit-lie bans, some of whom have threatened the city with lawsuits, say such laws criminalize homelessness while not lowering the ranks of those living outside traditional dwellings.

Not everyone on the Council agrees that sit-lie is a good policy, either, asserting that the ban does little more than shuffle homeless residents around the island with unintended consequences.

“It moves the homeless issues from one community to the next,” Pine said Wednesday. She said the ban has forced many homeless drug and alcohol addicts from Waikiki to Kakaako, a district that typically sees more families with children living in tents and shanties on the street.

“It’s caused a very difficult issue for the homeless providers who are now seeing even more problems,” Pine said.

City attorneys had said repeatedly that sit-lie bills are best able to fend off constitutional challenges when access to businesses is being hindered by people sitting or lying on sidewalks. Caldwell, in his first veto message since becoming mayor in January 2013, said Bill 6 jeopardized the constitutionality of existing sit-lie areas.

The Council on Wednesday approved the veto override before it took up Bill 43, which Menor had introduced to mirror Caldwell’s version of what the expansion should be.

Menor said Bill 43 would apply only to sidewalks in commercial business districts. The Council eventually approved the measure on first reading, but that’s the standard procedure for many new bills.

Menor added that he’s concerned city taxpayers could face hefty costs defending the law, should it now be challenged in court.

“The prohibitions are supposed to apply only to commercial and business areas. To the extent that you amend that law to include noncommercial areas raises constitutional problems because it conflicts with the scope and purpose of the law,” he said. Bill 6 supporters have not provided any legal arguments to rebut the corporation counsel’s points.

Waipahu resident David Cannell attended Wednesday’s meeting and said the city must do more to address its growing homelessness problem.

“Have you been down to Kakaako lately? It’s a city of squalor. This is a Third World country,” Cannell said during a break in Wednesday’s meeting. He said his family lived homeless on Oahu for about eight years.

“Of course people shouldn’t be on the sidewalk,” he said. “That’s terrible. But there needs to be alternatives. Everybody has to go somewhere to get some sleep. So where do they go?”

Star-Advertiser reporter Gordon Y.K. Pang contributed to this story.