California Water Service Group

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the California Water Service Group year-end 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would like to hand the conference to your speaker today. David Haley, Vice President and Corporate Controller. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Victor. Welcome, everyone, to the 2020 year-end and fourth quarter earnings results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki, our President and CEO, Tom Smagle, our Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Paul Townsley, our Vice President of Business Development and Chief Regulatory Officer, and Shannon Dean, our Vice President of Customer Service and Chief Citizenship Officer. Replay dial-in information for this call can be found in our year-end earnings release, which was issued earlier today. The replay will be available until April 26th. As a reminder, before we begin, the company has a slide deck to accompany the earnings call this quarter and year end. The slide deck was furnished with an AK this morning and is also available at the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at this quarter and year end results, we'd like to take a few minutes to cover forward-looking statements. During the course of the call, the company may make certain forward-looking statements. Because these statements deal with future events, they're subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from the company's current expectations. Because of this, the company strongly advises all current shareholders as well as interested parties to carefully read and understand the company's disclosures on risk and uncertainties found in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, press releases, and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commissions. I'm going to pass it over to Marty to begin.

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us as we recap our 2020 efforts and release our 2020 results. We thought we would do it a little bit differently this morning. I'm going to start off with some brief comments, overview in the year, and I'm going to hand it over to Tom, and then we'll go through our normal deck. I want to do that because almost by every measure, 2020 was a year like no other. We started the year with a delayed general rate case that was almost a year late that we reeled the book here in December, and we finished the year 2020 with record earnings. It was a year of record capital spending as we invested almost $300 million in our infrastructure improvement program, which is up 9.1% from 2019, which was our old record. As part of this program, we replaced a record 169,000 feet of main during 2020, and we completed the largest single capital project in the company's history, the Palos Verdes Peninsula Water Reliability Project that went into service in the fourth quarter of 2020. We closed on our transaction of our acquisition of Rainier View Water, which doubled the size of Washington Water. And as many of you may have noted, we increased our dividend 8.2% earlier this year in January, given the strong financial position that we were ending the year with. At a time when many companies were cutting spending and adjusting to the economic shock associated with the pandemic, we recognized the critical role our economic activity plays in the communities that we served. As part of this, we donated thousands of units of PPE to first responders and the communities that we serve, and many of these communities that were underprepared were more of the rural communities. We donated a record $1.7 million to various community support organizations that supported our customers during a difficult time with the pandemic. We increased the size of the Cal Water Philanthropic Scholarship Program for all eligible customers in the communities that we serve. And we recorded a record $51.4 million in diverse spending on diverse suppliers that help us achieve our mission throughout the service area. We forgave more than $400,000 of overdue balances for customers struggling to pay their bills. And of course, we suspended shutoffs very early on during the pandemic to ensure our customers had the water they needed to fight the pandemic at their homes. On the governance side, we completed the first-ever ESG materiality assessment that lays the foundation for our continued work on climate change, sustainability, conservation, and other major ESG and enterprise-wide risks that can affect our operations. We ended the year with zero primary and secondary water quality violations. And despite the worst fire season in California history, Coupled with numerous public safety power shutdowns, none of our customers experienced any major outages during the dry, hot summer months and fire season. The Cal Water team of water professionals operated safely seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, doing what they do best. And we accomplished all this during the worst pandemic in the last 100 years. It was truly a year of countless challenges and many unknowns. And we're very proud to share our results with you here today. Having said that, I do want to take a special moment to thank all the Cal Water employees for their hard work and dedication that has led to the outstanding results that we noted during 2020. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom to start us off going through the deck. Tom.