It’s wind-down time for the Citrus County Hospital Board.

Created by legislative act in 1949 to oversee health care through what would become Citrus Memorial Hospital, the CCHB has outgrown its usefulness.

If a bill filed by Inverness Rep. JJ Grow becomes law, the CCHB will cease to exist on Oct. 1, 2026.

HB 4043 requires the hospital Board to dissolve and turn its remaining assets over to the Citrus County Board of County Commissioners.

The county would also oversee the 50-year lease with Hospital Corporation of America, which has operated what is now HCA Florida Citrus Hospital since 2013.

“We’ve been talking about this for six years,” hospital Board Chair Dr. Mark Fallows said in October when the Board voted to seek legislative dissolution.

Attorney William Grant, who has represented the CCHB for two decades, said a smooth transition will take several months.

“We want to be able to sunset in a way that’s consistent with the mission and the good work that all of you have done,” Grant said.

The CCHB existed in relative anonymity as a low-level taxing district for years. In 1987, its members, Governor appointees, created a separate nonprofit foundation Board to oversee hospital operations.

Those two boards eventually splintered when the foundation amended its bylaws in 2006 to increase its size, effectively placing hospital Board members in the minority.

Detailed reviews of the hospital’s finances showed significant instability.

“The hospital started getting deeper and deeper in debt,” Fallows told Citrus County Commissioners.

The CCHB and the Foundation Board agreed to seek bids to either sell or lease the hospital. They received bids from three for-profit hospitals and one nonprofit and, in 2013, decided with HCA on a 50-year, $131 million lease.

The CCHB stopped collecting taxes in 2013, but its role did not end. Lawmakers in 2014 created the Citrus County Community Charitable Foundation to disburse interest payments from lease proceeds to meet the medical needs of Citrus County citizens. Its members represent a cross-section of Citrus County, including two elected officials.

More recently, the CCHB settled a dispute with the Agency for Health Care Administration. AHCA sought $5 million in Medicaid overpayments to CMH over 10 years; CCHB reduced that amount to $650,000.

The U.S. economy expanded at a surprisingly strong 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter as consumer spending, exports and government spending all grew.

U.S. gross domestic product from July through September — the economy’s total output of goods and services — rose from its 3.8% growth rate in the April-June quarter, the Commerce Department said Tuesday in a report delayed by the government shutdown. Analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet forecast growth of 3% in the period.

However, inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve would like. The Fed’s favored inflation gauge — called the personal consumption expenditures index, or PCE — climbed to a 2.8% annual pace last quarter, up from 2.1% in the second quarter.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PCE inflation was 2.9%, up from 2.6% in the April-June quarter.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic activity, rose to a 3.5% annual pace last quarter, up from 2.5% in the April-June period.

Within the GDP data, a category that measures the economy’s underlying strength grew at a 3% annual rate from July through September, up slightly from 2.9% in the second quarter. This category includes consumer spending and private investment, but excludes volatile items like exports, inventories and government spending.

Exports grew at an 8.8% rate, while imports, which subtract from GDP, fell another 4.7%.

Tuesday’s report is the first of three estimates the government will make of GDP growth for the third quarter of the year.

Outside of the first quarter, when the economy shrank for the first time in three years as companies rushed to import goods ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariff rollout, the U.S. economy has continued to expand at a healthy rate. That’s despite much higher borrowing rates the Fed imposed in 2022 and 2023 in its drive to curb the inflation that surged as the United States bounced back with unexpected strength from the brief but devastating COVID-19 recession of 2020.

Though inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% target, the central bank cut its benchmark lending rate three times in a row to close out 2025, mostly out of concern for a job market that has steadily lost momentum since Spring.

Last week, the government reported that the U.S. economy gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October. Notably, the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% last month, the highest since 2021.

The country’s labor market has been stuck in a “low hire, low fire” state, economists say, as businesses stand pat due to uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of elevated interest rates. Since March, job creation has fallen to an average 35,000 a month, compared to 71,000 in the year ended in March. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said that he suspects those numbers will be revised even lower.

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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.