The owners of Hawaiian Memorial Park won support for an expansion of their cemetery from the Honolulu City Council on Wednesday despite lingering objections from neighbors that such a project would have an adverse impact on their homes and the surrounding Kaneohe environment.

The Council voted to approve Bill 57 (2016), an updated version of the Koolau Poko Sustainable Communities Plan, which includes allowing up to 28.5 acres to be used for cemetery operations, but not other development.

Language was included that calls for the expansion to take place in phases that would leave the area closest to homes on Lipalu Street, where the majority of opponents reside, to be developed last. Hawaiian Memorial officials estimated it would take at least 20 years to reach that phase.

Cemetery officials still will need to complete an environmental impact study and win approval from the state Land Use Commission before they can proceed with the expansion. A 2009 request by Hawaiian Memorial seeking to expand the cemetery by 50 acres was rejected, in part, because LUC members said they did not believe the expansion was consistent with the Koolau Poko plan.

The project received the support of the Koolaupoko Hawaiian Civic Club, which has reached an agreement with Hawaiian Memorial to establish a nonprofit that would care for a newly established Kawa‘ewa‘e Heiau cultural preserve on 14.5 acres within the property.

Longtime Windward area resident Susan Wong, clad in a green “Support HMP” T-shirt like several dozen other expansion supporters, told Council members that her relatives have been buried at the cemetery since the 1960s.

West Oahu resident Alicia Maluafiti said four generations of her family are buried at Hawaiian Memorial and she would like for it to be her final resting place as well. “I don’t want to be in Mililani, I don’t want to be in Valley of the Temples; my family is in Hawaiian Memorial.”

But Grant Yoshimori urged the Council to take the expansion out of the Koolau Poko plan, noting that other Oahu cemeteries have expanded recently and will be able to handle the island’s burial needs. “HMP does not need to destroy nature to continue to profit,” he said. “If they increase the burial density, they could truly let loved ones be close to one another.”

Yoshimori said the expansion project flies in the face of the basic tenet of the Koolau Poko plan to protect watershed land by keeping it in preservation. “This is a watershed region.”

Julianne McCreedy, another nearby resident, said she opposed the idea of the cemetery’s owners being allowed to “deforest, grade and fill in 28 acres of a prime watershed region,” adding, “Our community will be exposed to a phenomenal degree of safety and health risks.”

Hawaiian Memorial officials said remaining concerns about the project’s impact can be addressed with the environmental study and the LUC approval process.

Also on Wednesday the Council voted:

>> To give final approval to Bill 66, expanding the sit-lie ban zone in the Ala Moana-Sheridan area to include Victoria Street, and expanding the Iwilei zone to include a portion of Pacific Street.

>> To give final approval to Bill 22, creating a pilot project from Sept. 1 to June 30, 2018, establishing $10 certificates for people to bring feral or community cats into participating clinics to be spayed or neutered, significantly lower than the typical cost. The bill also allows for people who receive Medicaid or low-income housing vouchers to obtain spay/neuter certificates for their pets — dogs or cats — for $20.

>> To give first-reading approval to Bill 70, banning smoking of tobacco and e-cigarettes in cars in the presence of children under 18.