Operations & Maintenance Manager

The Rathdrum Power Plant is a 275 MW combined-cycle natural gas-fired project that commenced commercial operations in September 2001 and is tolled under a long-term agreement to Avista. The tolling agreement expires in October 2041. Rathdrum's equipment configuration is platformed on GE 7FA technology, along with a heat recovery steam generator and steam turbine. The project includes an SCR and is a recent vintage, environmentally compliant project.

Rathdrum Power is seeking an experienced, hands-on Operations and Maintenance Manager to lead the safe, reliable, compliant, and cost-effective operation of its combined-cycle power generation facility. This position provides day-to-day leadership for Operations, Mechanical Maintenance, Electrical, and Instrumentation and Controls personnel and serves as a key member of the plant leadership team.

The successful candidate will combine strong technical judgment with practical leadership, workforce development, disciplined work management, and a visible commitment to safety. The role requires an individual who can balance equipment reliability, operational readiness, regulatory requirements, employee development, outage execution, and financial performance in a changing business environment.

• Lead, coach, and develop Operations and Maintenance personnel while promoting accountability, teamwork, open communication, and continuous improvement.
• Establish clear performance expectations; provide timely feedback; conduct performance reviews; and support recruiting, onboarding, qualification, succession planning, and employee retention.
• Maintain appropriate staffing, shift coverage, callout readiness, and contractor support to meet operational and outage needs.
• Build a strong plant culture in which employees are empowered to identify risks, raise concerns, and improve work practices.

• Provide oversight of plant operations to support safe starts, shutdowns, dispatch response, stable operation, and high availability and reliability.
• Review operating data, logs, alarms, events, and equipment trends; ensure abnormalities are investigated, documented, communicated, and corrected.
• Develop and maintain operating procedures, standing orders, rounds, training programs, qualification standards, and emergency response expectations.
• Participate in incident investigations, root-cause analyses, management-of-change reviews, and corrective-action tracking.
• Coordinate closely with the Plant Manager, Plant Engineer, Compliance, Environmental Health and Safety, owners, dispatch entities, vendors, and other stakeholders.

• Direct preventive, predictive, corrective, and condition-based maintenance programs for mechanical, electrical, and controls systems.
• Set maintenance priorities using equipment condition, operational risk, safety, compliance, cost, and production impact.
• Ensure effective use of the computerized maintenance management system, including work requests, planning, scheduling, backlog management, equipment history, inventory, and closeout documentation.
• Lead outage planning and execution, including scope development, schedules, contractor coordination, permits, quality control, commissioning, startup readiness, and lessons learned.
• Support long-range asset planning, lifecycle assessments, capital projects, major repairs, and spare-parts strategies for aging plant equipment.

• Demonstrate visible safety leadership and ensure work is performed in accordance with applicable OSHA requirements, company policies, site safety programs, and accepted industry practices.
• Maintain strong standards for lockout/tagout, confined space, hot work, electrical safety, contractor safety, job briefings, work permits, and housekeeping.
• Support compliance with environmental permits and applicable NERC, regional reliability, and other regulatory requirements; maintain complete, accurate, and readily retrievable records.
• Ensure events, near misses, environmental concerns, and compliance issues are reported promptly and corrected sustainably.

• Develop and manage Operations and Maintenance budgets, forecasts, purchase requests, contractor expenditures, and cost-control initiatives.
• Prepare clear recommendations for maintenance, capital, staffing, and reliability investments using risk, lifecycle cost, and…