Building codes are written in blood.
The refusal to issue a septic permit noted in a nearby comment is a prime example. Such things should be "will issue" so long as they won't cause any health or environmental problems in that location.
The problem isn't that they're forbidden from using a septic field when there's a perfectly good sewer line nearby. The problem is that they're being charged $40k for a sewerage connection. Where I live, it costs only $1000 for all the permits and inspections required for a new connection.
I would have to disagree that the unreasonably high fee is the only problem there. Charging a captive customer an unreasonable amount is certainly abusive. But so is arbitrarily forbidding what is permitted on private land. Such restrictions should require clear and articulable justification based on real world impact.
This is really outside my wheelhouse, but I could see an argument being made about the capacity of the larger system.
E.g. The direct, marginal cost of installing service to your house is $200 to review the plans, send the guy out for an inspection etc. But the added capacity requirements of you and the 10 new houses in your development puts an upstream sewer out of capacity, costing $50,000 to upgrade. If you don't charge the full marginal cost through the whole system for the upgrade, either the rest of the city is subsidizing your marginal cost, or there's a significant monetary shortfall on the short (say 1-3 year) timeframe, and you'll hope a rate increase is approved to make up for it.
If there were a need to charge for capacity upgrades, it seems such things should be billed separately and explicitly. (My electric bill itemizes hookup, transmission, and generation among other things.)
And absolutely none of it explains why septic should be disallowed!
These days, septic should be disallowed, if a reasonable sewer is available, as these days the effluents contain all kinds of toxic and non-degradable stuff that poisons the land and ground water. Over here, lossy septic tanks are illegal. You can either hookup to a sewer, treat your wastewater in situ via certified processes or, under some conditions, use a non-draining septic tank and have the wastewater treated.
I don't know your profession but let's take a statistical guess and say you're a software developer.
If I asked you to drive out to my place to take a look at 500 lines of Javascript, and tell me if the code is kosher, and if you're wrong I'm going to sue you. How much would you want to be paid to do that?
I think the local municipality typically sends an employee out to do the inspection? At least that's how it worked for me in the past (tbf that wasn't specifically sewer though). Permits having a nominal paperwork fee is understandable.
I very much doubt that the inspector only visits one property per day, or that they are paid anywhere near $1000 per day.