Full hospital board set to review lawsuits

CRYSTAL RIVER — The Citrus County Hospital Board meets today with five trustees for the first time in two years with an agenda that points toward resolving lingering differences with Citrus Memorial hospital officials.

New trustees Mike Bays, Gene Davis and Krista Joseph join Robert Priselac and Debbie Ressler. The new board also has a new meeting place: out of from the cramped conference room in attorney Bill Grant’s office and into the spacious conference room in the hospital’s administrative building.

Trustees are expected to also meet today in closed session for about an hour to discuss the Citrus Memorial Hospital Foundation’s offer to settle numerous lawsuits between the two boards. If approved, only one lawsuit — challenging the constitutionality of a 2011 state law giving trustees hospital oversight — would remain. That lawsuit is awaiting a district court of appeal decision.

Bays said he was looking forward to sitting down with the new board.

“We’ve made a lot of headway,” he said. “That’s the momentum we hope to keep moving.”

Just days prior to Bays, Davis and Joseph taking office, the two boards met without attorneys present to discuss details of settling the lawsuits. The foundation board also immediately offered free office space for the hospital board, which about a week later moved from Grant’s office to a hospital auxiliary building.

Along with the lawsuits issue, trustees are expected to approve payments to the hospital for indigent care. The trustees advanced $800,000 toward $1 million budgeted for charity care in the 2011-12 fiscal year. CCHB Chief Operating Officer Vickie LaMarche said reviews of patient-care receipts show the hospital is due nearly $200,000 additional.

 WHAT: Citrus County Hospital Board meeting.
 WHEN: 3:30 p.m. today.
 WHERE: CMH Administrative Board room, second floor, 502 W. Highland Blvd., Inverness.

Contact Chronicle reporter Mike Wright at 563-3228 or mwright@chronicleonline.com.