Spokane leaders last week climbed out of a $7 million budget hole and approved the city’s 2010 budget with no layoffs and no dramatic loss of city services. The approval allows officials to concentrate on a bigger financial challenge: a predicted deficit of more than $10 million in 2011.

The sluggish economy is affecting Inland Northwest residents’ ability to heat their homes. Utilities are reporting higher rates of delinquent payments and shut-offs. And entities that provide energy assistance have been besieged with pleas for help.

Effective Jan. 1, energy costs are going up for Avista Corp.’s Eastern Washington customers. On Tuesday, the state Utilities and Transportation Commission gave the Spokane-based utility approval to charge more for electricity and natural gas. But the three-member commission decided that Avista can only collect a fraction of the amount it requested in a rate case filed last January.

Flushing your toilet in the city of Spokane may cost $5 a month more in 2010. Spokane Mayor Mary Verner on Monday presented her 2010 budget to the City Council. It includes a 15 percent rate increase for city sewage service.

State energy regulators today approved Avista Corp. cutting its natural gas rates by more than 25 percent.

Avista Utilities today asked Washington and Idaho regulators to approve electricity and natural gas increases that will boost average combined monthly payments $9 to $10 per month.

Spokane trash, sewer and water customers will soon have to pay a few extra dollars a month on their utility bills. The Spokane City Council unanimously approved on Monday a 3.5 percent billing increase that had been proposed in the fall by Mayor Mary Verner.

Spokane trash, sewer and water customers will soon have to pay a few extra dollars a month on their utility bills.

The Grant County Public Utility District will renew expansion of its fiber-optic network after a two-year hiatus imposed because of significant financial losses, but the decision by no means puts the controversy over the operation behind it. A new lawsuit alleging conspiracy and racketeering by the district has been filed in U.S. District Court. Many of the claims repeat, sometimes verbatim, charges the PUD itself made against another electric utility, Benton County Rural Electric Association. That 2004 lawsuit was settled out of court, with the REA paying the PUD about $450,000. Neither side admitted wrongdoing.

A turf war between two utilities serving Spokane escalated Thursday with the disclosure of a proposed electricity rate settlement. Terms, if approved by Washington regulators, will allow Washington Water Power Co. to match prices offered largely to commercial customers by Inland Power & Light Co. where utility distribution lines overlap. Inland has underbid WWP for new accounts because, as a member-owned cooperative, its board of directors sets the rates without review by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.

A new coalition that combines labor, environmental and farm interests has asked Washington Gov. Gary Locke to delay action on electricity deregulation, which they say could sacrifice one of the state's biggest economic assets. Consumers for Common Sense delivered a letter to Locke's office Friday that suggests deregulation, which gives all electricity consumers a choice of suppliers, would jeopardize low rates, reliability, and funding for energy conservation and environmental protection. "We hope you would frame the debate by asking all the proponents of change to answer the following question: 'What problem are we trying to fix?"' the letter says.

Documents obtained by The Oregonian show a long chain of misjudgments by the Bonneville Power Administration has cost its ratepayers at least $115 million for an abandoned power plant. The unfinished power project, rusting amid weeds near Tacoma, is now part of a bitter legal battle being fought behind closed doors by the plant's Nebraska-based developer, Tenaska Washington Partners II.

The new $62 million power plant at Minidoka Dam on the Snake River is running so smoothly that a nickel balances atop a 30-ton generator bearing. It is an old trick engineers use to test for vibration, mechanical construction inspector John Milles said. Vibration is something dam overseers do not want to see in their brand-new plant.

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig convenes The Power Summit today. The daylong gathering of experts is extensively underwritten by substantial contributors to Craig's 1996 re-election that have a vested interest in electricity deregulation. Critics, even some who are participating, contend the event is stacked up to be nothing more than a rally for deregulation.

WWP project manager Harold Wilkinson prepares to open the doors on the fuel cell installed at the downtown Doubletree Hotel. It is the first commercial fuel cell sited anywhere in the Northwest. Photo by Torsten Kjellstrand/The Spokesman-Review