Matt Drury, director of government relations for the Parks Department, said the department would support the transfer once the city curtailed burials there. He said a transition would be a “complicated undertaking,” making it “difficult to predict how quickly the transition could occur.”

After all, the island has crumbling buildings, wild landscape and a lack of infrastructure, city officials testified.

They described other complications in adapting an island that has served as the city’s public cemetery, or potter’s field, where homeless, poor, stillborn and other unclaimed bodies are buried in mostly mass, unmarked graves dug by inmates from Rikers Island working for $1 an hour.

Roughly one million people have been buried on Hart Island since 1869. It is still a burial ground for roughly 1,100 unclaimed bodies per year that arrive by ferry for burial in bare wooden coffins and are stacked three high in rows of six, in trenches as long as a football field.

At the hearing, city officials said they would begin exploring alternative burial sites, as Hart Island has space to accommodate only up to 10 more years of burials.

Several Bronx residents called the park idea misguided. But Melinda Hunt, who has long supported opening up the island, said the site should continue to be a burial ground even while serving as a park.

If the bill passes the Council, it would need to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said in a statement that it was “now time to chart a new course forward for the island.”