After six months of discussion, the East Lansing City Council isn't ready to vote on a proposed ordinance to ban homeless people from the city's parking facilities.

It's not the ordinance that's causing the delay — it's how the city would end up implementing it that is the problem, council members said Tuesday.

Instead of punishing, city officials want the proposal to benefit the homeless by providing them with proper shelter and resources to improve their well-being.

"How do we take that theory and put it into practice? That's the piece that's missing," Mayor Pro Tem Vic Loomis said during Tuesday's work session.

The ordinance would allow police to make arrests following verbal warnings, if the person refused to go to a shelter.

The council discussed the proposal for 90 minutes Tuesday and heard additional testimony from local social service agencies and the East Lansing Police Department, in an effort to better understand how to implement it.

Council members are still waiting for a written procedure that dictates what police and shelters should do if they end up removing a person from a city parking structure.

City Council members also did not receive the records they asked for, indicating the number of complaints police have received regarding people taking shelter in the parking structures.

"Nobody's keeping track," Councilmember Beverly Baten said. "Although we'd like to know, there's nothing we can do."

The department has recorded 20 suspected homeless individuals who were served with trespassing violations in East Lansing, but police can't provide more details because sometimes names are not documented, police Capt. Tom Johnstone told the council.

Lansing officials recorded 3,200 homeless individuals in the area last year. Of those, 532 were listed as chronically homeless, said Joan Jackson Johnson, director of Lansing's Department of Human Relations and Community Services.

The numbers do not differentiate between various municipalities within the region.

East Lansing police Chief Tom Wibert said the department doesn't record whether people are homeless — which is why it can't provide better numbers.

"Homelessness is not a crime. It's not a field our computer recognizes," Wibert told the council. "It'd be the equivalent of going into our computer and finding out how many people were wearing green."

Wibert also voiced concern to the council about having police monitor the number of homeless people in East Lansing.

"For us to start tracking, for us to be that intrusive and keeping files, it smells of the Red Squad days to me," he said. "Somebody should track that, but not the police."

A homeless person's physical state determines how police handle situations, which is why it's hard to draft a blanket policy, Johnstone told the council.

"(A blood alcohol count of) .30 is the cutoff. Automatically, you go to the hospital," he said. "But at what level can we bring them to a shelter if they're willing to go?"

Wibert said he supported a written policy because it would demonstrate what officers already do in practice.

"It really would help the misperception of how people think the police handle homeless people," he said. "The practices that we have in place right now, I think it's a great idea to put those in writing and have those out there for people to give scrutiny to and give input."