Sorry for beating a dead horse, but when doing my browsing for replica chairs a few pages back, I saw this but missed the price.
Platner lounge chair replicas for $355.
Unlike the ones I posted, these are lounge chair replicas and not the kitchen chair replicas.
Having worked with regular reproductions, cheap reproductions, and "authentic reproductions" (everything is a copy unless it's an antique), there are good reproductions and bad. You can find an eames lounge chair, for example, for $500, for $1500-$2000, and then the Herman Miller authorized one for $4500+
The thing to understand is... you really get what you pay for. If you do your homework, it often because clear that the mid-range reproductions, which aren't authorized, are often built to the spec of the original and have solid detailing/craftsmanship. The stuff that's really cheap is, surprise surprise, cheap and poorly made. You want to hit the sweet spot between paying too much, and paying too little - the good reproductions toe that line well, and you don't pay through the nose just for the licensing and/or prestige that Herman Miller will charge you for. The good reproductions, however, still don't have the kind of warranty that a shop like Herman Miller has... so for high use/high wear, they still aren't the best bet.
My office, for example, has the classic eames office chairs in the boardroom - the authorized reproductions from herman miller. A developer client wanted the same chairs, but opted for knockoffs. I kid you not, 2 years on the knockoffs are falling to pieces. The wheel came off a couple, the arms are loosening and falling off others, the thread in the leather is popping left and right.
So for the Platner chairs, good on the city for paying for quality. They bought a solid piece that has an equally solid warranty in case of unseen defects, and the chairs should last quite a while. Sure, they could have gone cheaper, but as Towhey points out the expected cost over the life of the chair is less than $100/year. That isn't all that bad.
I still wish more of a fuss was being made about the $100million + that is being wasted by going back to a subway in scarborough. That has so much more relevance to taxpayers than furniture at city hall, yet for some reason one causes outrage and the other, well, doesn't.