John Stucke

A Clark Fork, Idaho man is dead after a Sunday morning pickup truck collision along River Road in North Idaho.

Rockwood Clinic’s former chief financial officer has filed a whistleblower complaint accusing the large medical practice of attempting to force him into filing misleading financial reports. When Gregg Becker refused, Rockwood fired him, according to a companion lawsuit seeking more than $5 million in damages.

An insurance reimbursement showdown pitting emergency room doctors at Providence Holy Family Hospital against Premera Blue Cross has been resolved.

Washington’s unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent in January as 13,200 jobs were created.

A fire that gutted a Post Falls mansion two weeks ago has stymied investigators. “We’ve reached a dead end,” said Dan Ryan, a Kootenai County Fire Department division chief.

Columbia Bank’s effort to escape a $91,000 monthly lease for its downtown Spokane branch has spurred a breach of contract lawsuit. The Tacoma-based lender bought the best loan assets and bank branches of the failed Bank of Whitman last summer, and now wants to relocate its branch from the high-profile brick and glass building along Riverside Avenue between Wall and Howard streets.

Sterling Financial Corp. has laid off 6 percent of its employees this winter. The Spokane-based holding company of Sterling Savings Bank anticipates saving $12 million in payroll and will charge off $3 million in severance pay. The bank has about 175 branches, including 71 in Washington.

Sterling Financial Corp. is laying off 6 percent of its employees this winter.

Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center will be allowed to add 75 new patient beds under a legal settlement reached Monday. The beds will come at the expense of Holy Family Hospital, Sacred Heart’s affiliated hospital in North Spokane, which will shrink from 272 licensed beds to 197.

Providence Health Care is shaving $550,000 from its Spokane property tax bill each year as nonprofit hospitals across the state take advantage of a court ruling that extended them new exemptions. The tax cut for Providence amounts to about a third of its property tax. The hospital system, which runs Sacred Heart Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital, also is owed a $2.2 million property tax refund as a retroactive application of the court ruling.

Sterling Financial Corp. earned a $39.1 million profit in 2011, continuing its turnaround from near-collapse during the height of the nation’s financial crisis. According to financial reports released Wednesday, Sterling’s loss the previous year – 2010 – was $756.1 million. Most of that was due to accounting maneuvers and loan write-offs.

Job losses in retail trade and food services pushed Spokane’s unemployment rate to 9 percent in December. That’s up from 7.9 percent in November and the highest since August. Economists expected the jobless numbers to worsen in December. But they didn’t expect the number to hit 9 percent, said Doug Tweedy, regional economist with the Washington State Employment Security Department.

Competition among medical helicopter companies continues to sharpen across the Inland Northwest as Life Flight Network opens its second northern Idaho base in two years – a region that for two decades has been served by Spokane-based Northwest MedStar. The expansion by Life Flight into Sandpoint is a multimillion-dollar venture for the Oregon air-ambulance service. It will station one helicopter and one airplane in Sandpoint and employ 14 people, including nurses, paramedics, pilots and mechanics.

Kootenai County’s unemployment rate dropped half a percentage point in December to 9.8 percent – breaking a string of 19 months in which the jobless rate was stuck in double digits. Idaho’s unemployment rate dipped to 8.4 percent in December, down a full percentage point from a year earlier, according to the Idaho Department of Labor. There were 698,000 Idahoans working in December, the most since March 2009.

Conflicting data continues to cloud Washington’s economic outlook and jobless rates. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said today that unemployment dropped to 8.5 percent in December from 8.7 percent in November. Those numbers are based on household surveys.