Our operating revenue for the quarter was up to a $147.7 million from $125.6 million in the first quarter of 2020 and we'll talk about the reasons for that in a moment.
And our net loss decreased from $20.3 million to $3 million, as well as our earnings per share, loss per share rather went from $0.42 loss to a $0.06 loss for the quarter.
So as we mentioned -- as I mentioned a moment ago, the net loss decreased by $17.3 million and that was primarily the result of the adoption of the California General Rate Case late last year.
The first was obviously, the rate increases associated with that, that added $4 million of revenue.
We're adding $7.6 million of revenue associated with that.
So we're expecting to see lower AFUDC equity here in the quarter, it was down about $1 million.
The market value of certain of our retirement plan assets was in -- so the market value increased $0.3 million as compared to a loss of $4.7 million in the first quarter of 2020.
And then our unbilled revenue very similar, we had a $1,000 loss on unbilled revenue, very small and probably more typical as compared to a negative $3.7 million in 2020 which was a sort of an atypical drop in that unbilled revenue accruals.
Just wanted to remind everyone that during 2021 we are refunding to customers in rates, $19 million of excess deferreds associated with the change in tax rate for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
And that drives down the effective income tax rate to 6%.
And just to update you on the estimates, in 2020 we had $160 million of deductible mains and services repairs investments, and our current estimate for 2021 is that we will have $60 million that qualifies for that tax treatment, and so that's going to be a factor that's going to be a little bit lower for the year 2021.
Capital spending is still anticipated to be between $270 million to $300 million.
We will be filing that cost of capital application on Monday, May 3rd, and in our application that we will be filing with the Commission we're requesting a return on equity of 10.35%, that is up from the currently approved 9.2% cost of equity.
So that our embedded cost of debt is going down a 128 basis points from the previously authorized 5.51% cost of debt, to a new cost of debt of 4.23%.
Coupling those two together the increase in cost of equity and the decreased cost of debt means that our rate of return -- authorized rate of return that we are requesting would go up just slightly from 7.48% to 7.5%, and what that really means from a customer perspective is that the median bill increase should be about $0.34 a month.
I might also point out that our capital structure, which is about 53% equity and 47% debt will remain unchanged in this particular application.
We have seen and continue to see an increase in customer account aging from suspension of collection activities, that bills currently over 90 are about $11.6 million, and we have adjusted our bad debt reserve, an additional $0.5 million from $5.2 million to $5.7 million, and I'll talk more about some creative things we're doing working with the Commission a little bit later on collection activities.
The incremental expenses associated with our COVID response was approximately $300,000.
Interesting to note that water sales have been a 105% of adopted, really driven by the fact the residential demand has been higher and that's been offset by lower business and industrial use.
We had $84.4 million of cash, and additional capacity of about $115 million on the lines of credit, subject to some borrowing conditions.
And so this chart, and projection only goes through system there are of $285 million is the midpoint between our window of $270 million to $300 million of capex during the year, and we --- when we have our second quarter call, and we release the details of our General Rate Case in California, I'll be updating this slide.
Additionally, and this is more kind of late breaking news, some of you may have seen in the press, the last 24 hours to 48 hours, a few parts of the state of California have declared drought emergencies.
Given that the very mild winter season that we had this year coupled with the fact that our snow pack as of earlier this week was only 25% of normal, we fully expect to see more drought declarations at the local level happen throughout 2021.
What does that mean at a 25,000 foot level, the reservoirs in California, currently, they're in decent shape, I wouldn't say they're in great shape.
As we think about fire season and PSPS season as we point out in our ESG report despite the many challenges of operating in a COVID environment over 97% of our employees have completed their emergency response training this year and our efforts are well under way to be prepared for early fire season and the various PSPS events that could happen throughout the state.
We do not have our of employees back in the office yet, 90% of our employees have been at work every day, because they are field employees.

Summary:
Our operating revenue for the quarter was up to a $147.7 million from $125.6 million in the first quarter of 2020 and we'll talk about the reasons for that in a moment.
And our net loss decreased from $20.3 million to $3 million, as well as our earnings per share, loss per share rather went from $0.42 loss to a $0.06 loss for the quarter.