While Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell is pressing the City Council to speed up approval for a stalled affordable senior housing project on the outskirts of Chinatown, the project’s developer has put out plan revisions it hopes will meet with the approval of project opponents.

Caldwell last week brought up the city-sponsored Halewaiolu project on River Street as one of two affordable rental housing projects that the Council has held up in recent months when, at the same time, Council leaders have criticized his administration for foot-dragging on providing affordable housing with the tens of millions of dollars they have provided him.

Caldwell’s response to that criticism is that he needs more housing positions to help develop the projects.

At a briefing on the city budget Tuesday, Caldwell told reporters he’s baffled as to why the Council has yet to even formally stamp and accept from the administration a proposed development agreement between the city and Michaels Development Co. that needs Council approval and was submitted in November.

“Let’s not delay,” he said. “It may not be perfect for everyone in Chinatown, but the vast majority of the people in this community supports this project.”

He reiterated a warning by a Michaels executive that delay could endanger the project’s viability.

“If it doesn’t go shortly, the developer’s going to lose its funding and financing from the state and then it’s pau,” the mayor said.

Council Chairman Ernie Martin, in response, told reporters that the delay is due to neighbors complaining that their opinions have been discounted and not addressed.

His office showed the Honolulu Star-Advertiser a letter from an executive of Borthwick Mortuary, next door to the planned tower, that contends that neither city nor Michaels officials contacted the company about the project until recently.

Martin said the initial concept for the River Street project was spawned by Council members six years ago. “Why has it taken (the administration) six years to come forward with the project?” Martin asked, facetiously. “So, for us to take a few months longer than we normally would, I wouldn’t say that’s irresponsible.”

Martin said the Council won’t move on a resolution approving the development agreement until the administration finishes a series of community meetings.

But Sandy Pfund, head of Caldwell’s Office of Strategic Development, said she and other city officials held at least 15 community meetings before submitting the development agreement to the Council in November.

Several more have been held since, including some with the project’s closest neighbors. The next community meeting will be in the mayor’s third-floor conference room at Honolulu Hale at 3 p.m. Tuesday. One more is planned for March 14.

Meanwhile, Michaels recently enlisted a feng shui expert — its third — to advise the company about design revisions to address concerns that the project did not adhere to feng shui principles.

Those concerns have been brought by leaders of the Lum Sai Ho Tong clubhouse and temple, which are situated next door to the planned tower.

“We really want as many people as possible to be happy with it,” said Karen Seddon, Michaels vice president. “We’ve heard the concerns and worked very hard to address as many of them as we possibly can.”

Feng shui is the Chinese “wind-water” concept that people should find ways to achieve harmony with the environment around them. Seddon said Los Angeles-based feng shui consultant Simona Mainini was asked to weigh in on the position, location, design and effects the project would have.

The latest plans still call for 151 rentals in a single 231.5-foot tower. (The building has often been described as two towers because its architecture appears to show two separate towers joined by an elevator core and, at one point, the two sides were different heights, Seddon said.)

Mainini was largely in support of the position and location of the plan, Seddon said. The key revision is elimination of a “stack” or section of the building on the makai side of the design in an effort to keep units from being too close to two mortuary crematorium smokestack chimneys, Seddon said.

Units originally planned for that section will now be built on top of the tower. Architects and engineers achieved this without losing any units or raising the building’s height by reducing the height of each floor by a foot, to 9 feet from 10 feet, Seddon said.

Removing those units from the proximity of the crematorium chimneys was the main concern of Mainini, who is also an architect, Seddon said.

“And that was the big thing. In feng shui, you don’t want any residences in line with the crematorium (smokestacks),” she said.

Smaller provisions have been proposed including the use of shorter flower planters on the street-level courtyard where three retail shops are planned, enlarging the windows of the ground floor’s community center, and creating better landscaping between the new structure and the Lum Sai Ho Tong building.

The most contentious disagreement between Michaels and the club members: the distance between the Lum Sai Ho Tong property and the footprint of the new building. Seddon acknowledged that no changes have been made there in the latest revision.

Lum Sai Ho Tong has called for a 60-foot setback between its property and the new tower. Michaels officials counter that moving back that far in on the 24,000-square-foot parcel would make the project unfeasible, but revised their plan to include a 10-foot setback from the parking podium, on which the tower will sit, to the property line.

Howard Lum, Lum Sai Ho Tong president, declined comment on the latest plan.

Chu Lan Shubert-Kwock, president of the Chinatown Business and Community Association and vice chairwoman of the Downtown Neighborhood Board, praised Michaels for its latest plan.

“This doesn’t seem to be a problem of not observing established cultural sensitivity,” Shubert-Kwock said. “They went through the trouble of seeking out a qualified (feng shui) person who has an architectural background.”

Shubert-Kwock has criticized both Caldwell and Council members of endangering the viability of the project by foot-dragging on approving a development agreement and kowtowing to a small group of critics.

On Thursday night, the Downtown Neighborhood Board voted unanimously to endorse Michaels’ latest feng shui plan, according to board member Stanford Yuen.