The administration has relied on changing rationales to justify its reluctance, but the city’s Department of Social Services and others in the business of shelters argue the biggest concern is that hotels are inappropriate accommodations for many of their clients, even in times of emergency. People with mental health and substance abuse issues can’t just be dropped in a room, and the city argues it needs the discretion to keep some individuals in more traditional settings for their own safety.

With the battle now in the City Council, the mayor’s office is not backing down. The de Blasio administration helped scotch a vote on legislation that would have forced its hand in providing all single adults who are homeless their own hotel room. The normally staid public language that arises in disputes between the two sides of City Hall was put aside when the vote began gaining momentum.

“This latest version of the bill, which came out of nowhere overnight, is ham-fisted and reckless, self-defeatingly unilateral and ill-informed, and legally questionable and amateurish,” said Isaac McGinn, spokesperson for the city’s Social Services Department, in a recent statement.

After weeks at the bargaining table and a political fissure among lawmakers, the outcome is far from assured even as Covid-19 continues to course through the shelter system. Out of the 76 deaths of homeless individuals in the city, 52 have been single adults in congregate settings, the city said Monday.

In explaining its disdain for the Council bill, the de Blasio administration has given a shifting account of why it would be unable to comply.

During a hearing on the legislation in April, an official from Social Services said that the city was concerned with cost. In particular, the administration was unclear if the Federal Emergency Management Agency would reimburse the city for the hotel rooms.

But POLITICO subsequently reviewed letters between city agencies and federal officials going back to March. The missives lay out in detail which groups of people would be covered under the hotel isolation program — they include asymptomatic shelter clients who have been exposed to the virus. The city has since dropped this line of argument.

“What they’ve acknowledged is that [the guidance] is pretty clear from FEMA,” said Council Member Steve Levin, the sponsor of the legislation, in a recent interview.

Other qualms have remained constant, such as the administration’s argument that providing services for certain clients, such as those with mental health or substance abuse issues, would be too difficult or even dangerous in isolated hotel rooms without the proper staffing levels.

“I think the hotels are being put on a pedestal,” the mayor said during a press briefing earlier this month. “Hotels work for some things, they don’t work for everything.”

The Social Services Department said the city expected to have around 9,000 single adults in hotels, two to a room, as of Sunday and plans to move 1,000 more per week as necessary. But spreading everyone out to their own units while getting the other roughly 8,000 single adults out of congregate shelters would require legions of new staff. And many of the services they would provide would not be reimbursed by FEMA at a time when the city’s budget is in tatters.

“It’s not a question of funding: in the middle of a pandemic, while our city is standing up testing and tracing citywide and still responding to the virus in our hospitals and other settings, where are these thousands of new clinical/nursing staff coming from?” McGinn said in a statement.

Some service providers agree.

Muzzy Rosenblatt, the head of nonprofit Bowery Residents’ Committee, wrote a letter to the City Council Saturday urging lawmakers to reconsider the bill. Isolation for certain homeless individuals such as those with mental illness, addictive disorders or those who are elderly or have physical health challenges can be dangerous, he said. And if these people have not demonstrated a physical need to be isolated, the bill will end up making things worse.

“I am gravely concerned that the unintended consequences of this one-size-fits-all approach have either not been communicated or have been ignored, and that harm will come to some of those this legislation intends to help,” he wrote.

Officials from the Social Services Department hammered this point home during tense back-and-forth negotiations with the Council earlier this month. Initially, the de Blasio administration appeared to gain some ground in scoring concessions to the bill. The agency wanted the discretion to keep some individuals out of hotels based on service needs, and requested the ability to double up clients.

But nonprofits and some providers staunchly opposed the alterations and made their objections known during hours of online meetings. Advocates contend that emergencies call for extraordinary measures. And while there are risks of putting more single adults in hotels, none come close to the risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19.

“I think it’s a really horrendous excuse,” Shelly Nortz of the Coalition for the Homeless said in an interview. “We are worried about them, so we are not going to save their lives.”

The city oversees 100 shelters where single adults sleep in congregate settings, share communal bathrooms and eat in cafeterias — all arrangements that make it easier for the coronavirus to propagate. And it has.

Despite measures to stagger meal times and isolate symptomatic people, positive cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in nearly all of the congregate shelter locations, according to the city.

The outcome is unsurprising. Federal authorities had warned of the dangers that these types of shelters pose in a report last month that found large portions of staff and clients in shelters across the U.S. tested positive for Covid-19 — even in locations where no cases had been otherwise confirmed.

The report recommended keeping shelter clients socially distant and performing as much proactive testing as possible, but with testing severely lacking in New York and close contact in congregate settings largely unavoidable, Levin said those in crowded shelters should simply be moved into their own rooms instead.

“I don’t think there is a safe de-densification model,” he said.

Advocates and some providers had some early momentum. Levin declined to change most of the bill language, which had gained the backing of Council Speaker Corey Johnson. And lawmakers planned an emergency vote for Tuesday, setting up a collision course with the de Blasio administration, which mobilized behind the scenes.

The mayor’s office has normally used a soft touch in bouts with the Council, but this time around it began whipping votes, according to several Council sources — at one point indicating that Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks would rather resign than implement the law as written (The city said the commissioner did not actually threaten to leave). City Hall officials also said the legislation was illegal and would violate rules that prohibit the Council from preempting mayoral powers.

A group of Council members also began voicing reservations about where the isolation hotels would be located, fearing that the city would predominantly use facilities in low-income communities, opening up another crack in the legislative body.

“You’ll be hearing from my colleagues who are in the Black Latino and Asian Caucus in an effort to make sure that there is parity in these placements,” Council Member Robert Cornegy Jr. said during a budget hearing Monday, addressing Banks. “It’s not a Nimby conversation; it is a conversation of equity and parity.”

While it appeared Johnson was angling for a veto-proof majority, the shoring began to give way and the Council called off its emergency session. Now lawmakers, the administration and advocates appear to be back at the bargaining table.

Housing Works, the nonprofit led by King, said the organization has a template that works and that lawmakers should stick with the original idea.

It is currently running an isolation hotel for the Social Services Department, and providing care for the same types of special-need clients that the city is hesitant to place in isolated rooms. The organization has installed behavioral health workers on-site and is providing on-call psychiatric help via teleconferencing.

“If the right services are in place,” King said, “there is no one for whom it is inappropriate to move into a private hotel room.”