American Water Works Company, Inc.

Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Musgrave, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. At the end of our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Let me first go over some safe harbor language. Today, we'll be making forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding our future performance or other future events. These statements are predictions based on our current expectations, estimates, and assumptions. However, since these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from the results indicated or implied by such statements. Additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties, and factors, as well as a more detailed analysis of our financials and other important information, is provided in the second quarter earnings release and Form 10-Q, each filed yesterday with the SEC. This call will include a discussion of non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of our historical adjusted earnings per share to GAAP earnings per share and other disclosures related to our non-GAAP financial information can be found in the appendix of the slides for this call. And finally, all statements during this presentation related to earnings and earnings per share refer to diluted adjusted earnings and earnings per share. With that, I'll turn the call over to American Water's President and CEO, John Griffith.

Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Let's turn to slide five, and I'll start by covering some highlights of the second quarter and first half of the year. As we announced yesterday, we delivered solid financial results in the second quarter and through the first half of 2026. Adjusted earnings were $1.61 per share for the second quarter and more. In the first six months of 2026, adjusted earnings were $2.62 per share compared to $2.51 per share in the same period of 2025. With this strength across the business, combined with our expectations for the rest of the year, we continue to be on track to achieve our full year earnings guidance which we've again affirmed along with our long-term targets. David will share more about our results and guidance a bit later. I also want to acknowledge the great work of our state and corporate regulatory teams as they continue to successfully execute our regulatory strategy with rate cases and merger proceedings which I'll talk more about shortly. We have completed three rate cases already in 2026 in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, all of which authorized recovery of nearly 100% of the capital investments we have made in each state. As we've discussed with investors many times over the years, we strategically choose to operate in a diverse set of regulatory environments that we believe have been and will remain supportive of water and wastewater utility investments and consolidation. American Water continues to receive healthy support at the state level for the work that we do. We, along with utility commissions, all share a strong desire to promote customer affordability, resilient and reliable services, and financially strong utilities. We look forward to continuing to provide common sense solutions for the benefit of customers and communities across our 14 state footprint. Moving on to some of our other key accomplishments so far in 2026, We have invested $1.8 billion in capital projects and acquisitions year to date. This reflects our focus on making investments to better serve our customers and to grow the business. As we've said, growing to scale in our states greatly benefits our operating efficiency and long-term customer affordability. Speaking of customer growth, we were very pleased to close on the acquisition of systems from Nexus Water Group ahead of schedule on June 1st. Our teams did a great job of achieving all eight requisite state approvals in a timely and constructive manner. We're also excited to continue our progress on the municipal acquisition front with approximately 57,000 customer connections under agreement as of June 30. Overall, we're well on our way to executing our capital plan for 2026 and achieving our target of 2% customer growth. These efforts align squarely with our mission to provide safe, clean, reliable, and affordable service to our customers. Turning to slide six, I'm pleased to share that we've continued to achieve new milestones in the second quarter related to our proposed merger with Essential Utilities. You may recall, as part of the update we provided with Q1 earnings, we achieved our first state approval, Kentucky, in April. In May and June, we added Ohio and Virginia to the list of approvals received. It's also worth noting that so far, we're hearing good support for the merger during public input hearings, including in Pennsylvania in April and May. In other states, the merger cases are proceeding as planned, including very good progress in Texas, where we've reached a settlement in principle. We remain very pleased with our integration planning to date and the constructive relationships that continue to develop between the American Water and Essential Utilities teams. Consistent with our messaging from the merger announcement last October, we expect the merger to close by the end of the first quarter of 2027. With that, I'll hand it over to David to cover our financial and regulatory update in further detail. David.