Opinion ID: 170014
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Budget Line Item 3420:

Text: As part of its analysis of the financial viability of the project, Healthcare Realty prepared a detailed budget it called the Consolidating Development Budget, including the project's estimated expenses for Accounting, Leasing, Marketing, and many other professional costs. App. 122. For accounting, the budget estimated $12,953; for marketing, $10,000; for leasing, the chart simply says -, a hyphen. Id. The chart treats the - as if it were arithmetically equivalent to zero. In fact, Healthcare Realty later revealed, the figure for leasing costs should have been $180,000. Thus, the subtotal and total costs contained false information, because they relied on treating the applicable leasing costs as if they were zero, rather than a substantially higher number. If the Hospital justifiably relied on this information and Healthcare Realty failed to exercise reasonable care or competence in providing it, Healthcare Realty is liable. Richey, 904 P.2d at 802. The district court dismissed this claim because it thought substituting - for $180,000 was only nondisclosure, not misrepresentation. The court explained that it lack[ed] the wizardly power [to] . . . turn nothing into something for purposes of summary judgment. App. 736. However, in the charts presented, Healthcare Realty treated the hyphen as if it meant not nothing, but zero. Zero is a number, not the absence of one. See generally Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero 90-115 (1999). The usage in the budget is slightly confusing because, in the other budget attached to the POA, Healthcare Realty did use the numeral 0.00 instead of a hyphen. App. 116. But in the budget charts where hyphens appear, they are added as if they were zeroes. Thus, a reasonable jury could find that the projected leasing cost of zero given on line 3420 was false information supplied to the Hospital. A jury could also infer that listing the cost for leasing as zero, rather than using whatever underlying data were available, was negligent. When revising the budget in March, 2000, Healthcare Realty substituted a projected expenditure of $180,000, explaining that it had originally expected that the project management and contingency dollars would cover the cost of leasing and that subsequent events had made this impossible. Id. at 696. This suggests that Healthcare Realty was aware that leasing costs would be above zero, but instead of revealing this fact in the budget, buried the number in other line items. We cannot say, on this record, whether that treatment was reasonable. If subsequent events were responsible for making the zero estimate unrealistic, Healthcare Realty could not be held liable for misrepresentation. Without more information regarding these calculations, however, a jury might conclude that Healthcare Realty's representation that leasing would cost no money was a misstatement that the consultant knew at the time to be false. But that is a material issue of fact. The misrepresentation claim therefore survives summary judgment.