If all goes well, [DHHL head Micah] Kane acknowledged, the total cost of work, before any homes are built, will be $74 million, including the consultant fees charged to date by Community Planning.

That's more than twice as much as the company and Kane predicted the work would cost in mid-2004.

"That figure is almost unheard of," said Kama, of the homesteaders association. "There's all this money in the ground, but they haven't even started building homes," she said.
[...]
Oswald Stender, at-large trustee of the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs with extensive background in land development, wondered about the economic wisdom of spending at least $75 million in nonrecoverable infrastructure costs for a project of fewer than 400 homes.

"There must be something wrong with those numbers," said Stender, former chief executive of the Campbell Estate. "I've never heard of infrastructure costs that high," Stender said.