The law allows for the fees to cover the reasonable and actual costs of the work required. The city said $15k was too low, and raised it.

All that really matters is if they can prove the actual use of the funds in court. What are the typical lifetime costs associated with the Zoning variances for this sort of work? They mentioned trying to make this work faster, which implies to me they're looking to use this funding to offset more staff.

It sounds huge, but for huge multi-million dollar projects being done for long-term profit I am not going to shed a lot of tears as long as it's provably justified.

Indeed; this is a very strange comment section.

I read about the people dying; the "men" dying, yes. It was in the news.

I think people are confusing "the media isn't covering it" with "I personally haven't read the news at all."