It’s not explicit from the article one way or the other, but the “investigation” seems to refer to officials from the fire department, which doesn’t imply that charges are being considered but instead that questions about policy adherence have been raised.
It’s a poorly written article, with polarizing ambiguity.
It’s seemingly closer to $6b for that year, which is obviously a ton of money, but considering they employ north of 50,000 people, if each person costs them $75,000/yr that’s already $3.75b. NYC spends $2b on just their department of sanitation. It’s a city with like 8.5m people, everything costs crazy amounts of money.
https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2021/05/NYPD.pdf
https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2021/05/DSNY.pdf