Avista Utilities

Heather Rosentrater serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of Avista Utilities, overseeing the day-to-day regulated utility operations and capital deployment across the Washington, Idaho, and Oregon service territories. She reports to the CEO of the publicly traded parent company, Avista Corp, which sets the strategic direction for rate-base investment. Capital allocation decisions for non-utility real estate assets are less transparent but appear to be managed internally rather than through a separate family-office structure.

Infrastructure investment is driven by system needs and regulatory mandate rather than a proprietary deal flow model. The firm identifies generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades through integrated resource planning processes filed with state utility commissions — Washington's UTC and Idaho's PUC primarily — and those plans dictate the capital budget over multi-year rate-case cycles. The owned hydroelectric facilities on the Spokane and Clark Fork river systems are legacy assets, not acquired through an open-market sourcing process.

Avista Utilities is a regulated operating company and wholly owned subsidiary of Avista Corp (NYSE: AVA), a publicly traded energy holding company. It is not a family office, nor does it operate a multi-family office division. The firm's balance sheet includes non-utility real estate in Spokane that resembles a corporate proprietary investment portfolio, but this is ancillary to its core electric and gas distribution business.

Avista Utilities does not participate in external fund commitments in the manner of an institutional allocator. Its capital deployment is almost entirely direct — either into owned-and-operated rate-base assets, mandated environmental and resilience upgrades, or owned real estate in its headquarters city of Spokane. The firm was a founding investor in Inland Northwest Partners, a regional economic development entity, representing its most visible co-investment posture with external parties.

The dominant sector is regulated electric and natural gas utility infrastructure, with a growing emphasis on energy transition and renewable integration. The firm's generating portfolio is heavily hydroelectric, with assets in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and its clean-energy strategy includes non-emitting peaking resources and storage. Separately, the firm holds a small portfolio of commercial and mixed-use real estate in Spokane, anchored by the historic Steam Plant Square adaptive-reuse project.

The Avista Foundation is the corporate philanthropic vehicle of the Avista Corp enterprise. It operates as a separate legal entity with its own grantmaking guidelines, focused on community vitality, shelter, and hunger relief in the firm's service territory. The foundation is funded by Avista Corp shareholders rather than utility ratepayers, maintaining a regulatory separation between charitable activity and the cost-of-service model.

Co-investment activity is limited to specific regional economic development partnerships, most notably the firm's founding role in Inland Northwest Partners. For rate-base assets, the firm typically operates as the sole owner-operator under regulatory authorization. The Coeur d'Alene Tribe collaboration on shoreline and natural-resource management represents an additional co-investor-style relationship arising from shared geography rather than a formal fund structure.