This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the California Water Service Group Q4 and year-end 2022 earnings call. I would now like to turn the call over to Tom Scanlon, corporate controller. Please go ahead.
spk04: Thank you, Monty. Welcome, everyone, to the 2022 year-end fourth quarter earnings results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Martin Krolpenicki, our president and CEO. Thomas Smagle, our Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Greg Milliman, our Vice President of Rates and Regulatory Affairs. Replay dial information for this call can be found in our year-end earnings release, which was issued earlier today. The replay will be available until May 1st, 2023. As a reminder, before we begin, the company has a slide deck to accompany the earnings call this quarter. The slide deck was furnished with an 8K yesterday afternoon and is also available at the company's website at www.kellwater.com. Before looking at this year's 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 are subject to various risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from the company's current expectation. Because of this, the company strongly advises all current shareholders, as well as interested parties, to carefully read and understand the company's disclosure 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 Commission. I want to start by pointing out Note 16 and the Form 10-K the company filed yesterday. During the fourth quarter of 2022, the company identified an immaterial error for regulatory liability and corresponding decreases to operating revenue and deferred income taxes that were not recorded in 2019. This is associated with customer refunds. The error does not impact customer billings or cash refunded to customers. The company recorded corrected the error in the financial statements through a restrainment of opening retained earning balance to the year ended December 31, 2020. For more details, please see the file 10-K. I'm going to pass it over to Tom Smagle.
spk08: Thanks, Tom Scanlon, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to walk through, as I usually do, the results of our full year and our fourth quarter. And I'm going to start on page five of the slide deck, which is a table of our financial results. And starting at the bottom of that table, our EPS for the year went from $1.96 in 2021 to $1.77 in 2022, a decrease of 19 cents. Our net income attributable to California Water Service Group declined by $5.1 million or $5.1 The capital investments I do want to highlight, and we'll be talking about that a little bit on the call today, increased $34.6 million to a new record of $327.8 million of CapEx for the year. To try to describe the full year financial results on the next page, remember that the big impact to the year that we've had is an $11 million unrealized change, negative unrealized change in the valuation. of our non-qualified retirement plan assets. That was the big impact for the year. Obviously, it's also the third year of the California general rate case cycle. And typically in that third year, we see that rate increases don't keep up with the operating expense increases. And that was certainly the case here in 2022. I want to jump then to the next slide and talk about the fourth quarter on slide seven. In the fourth quarter, we did see, and I know we talked in the first three quarters of the year about our unbilled revenue. We did see that unbilled revenue bounce right back up to where we had expected it to be as we talked about. And so the quarter was much better than the fourth quarter of 2021. Our EPS for the quarter was $0.35 per share as compared to $0.07 per share in 2021. And the net income for the quarter in 2022 point one million. So as I said, and flipping to slide eight, the primary driver there was the reversal of the unbilled revenue. You saw that we had an increase of eleven point one and overall for the year we had an increase of about one point seven million dollars in unbilled revenue. That's fairly typical for us to have anywhere from positive a million or two to negative a million or two. That usually washes out with that factor. a variety of reasons, and we continue to see a little bit of general rate increase associated with that GRC step increase that we got at the first of the year in 2022. The bridges describe those items that I just talked about, and I'll leave those for you to look at. Again, the big factors on the year is the mark-to-market, the big factor normal. So we have a lot of regulatory matters to report on. We have Greg Milliman here with us, and I'm going to start with Greg talking about our California cost of capital case.
spk03: Thank you, Tom. On page 11, we discussed the cost of California cost of capital. There's really not much to report since the last quarterly report. There is no new news from the commission. As of today, The following commission process, the earliest that we could see a final decision would be April of 23. And I'll turn it back to you, Tom Smagle.
spk08: Thank you. Thank you, Greg. And because of the delay in issuing a decision, the company can't determine whether the commission is factoring in changes in market conditions or other reasons for reviewing the cost of capital for this long. We really can't say where the case is in terms of the timing, as Greg mentioned, as well as the outcome. And as we've been talking about on the third bullet there on slide 11, given the success of our financing program, we know that we had lower cost of debt that was in the application. And we don't yet know whether the Commission would apply retroactivity to the eventual cost of capital decision. We've seen and we've talked about a few things that lead us to conclude that that is not probable, given the facts and circumstances that we have right now. But if the commission were to go back, go back to the beginning of 22, we would expect that the reduction in cost of debt alone would be an $11 million annual negative impact for the company. But that would be recorded in any current period when we do see a final decision from the Commission if they go retroactive. Greg, turn it back to you for the rate case update.
spk03: Okay. On slide 12 is the California general rate case update. As of today, the decision is two months late. There is no new news on when we will see a proposed decision. However, since the decision is late, we have opened an interim rates memo account that will allow us to track the difference between the current rates and the final rates that come out of the decision, which will be effective or which is effective January 1st, 2023. Additionally, we received approval to increase rates in most of our districts by 4% that we will commenced starting April 15, 2023. Moving on to slide 13 with a focus on decoupling. It's a reminder that at the start of this year, we are no longer decoupled, so we will be back to pre-2008 conditions. There will be annual – because there is no decoupling, there will be annual variability in the sale and production, the water sales revenues, as well as the production costs. But we knew that was coming, so to mitigate this in our 2021 rate case, we addressed it primarily by shipping more recovery at fixed cost to fixed service charge, more of our revenue to fixed service charge, and then also use more realistic water mix sources water mix from various sources to have a more realistic water production cost. I'll turn it to you now, Marty.
spk09: Great. Thanks, Greg. As we talked about in the last conference call, the end of the third quarter, Governor Newsom did sign in California on September 30th a new law asking the CPUC to reconsider decoupling, which was a big win for the water industry, the industrial and water industry in the state of California. Shortly after that law was signed by the governor, the California Public Utilities Commission filed a California Supreme Court case based that it was now null and void based on the new law signed by the governor. We disagree with that notion and I'm very happy to report that the courts dismissed the PUC's motion to dismiss. So we are moving forward with our case with the California Supreme Court here during the first quarter of 2023. The case has been fully briefed and we anticipate having oral arguments in front of the state Supreme Court no later than mid-year of this year. So that court case is moving forward. I think all indications are going in the right direction, and we look forward to having our discussion with the courts here sometime over the next quarter or so. Greg, you want to go through the California tracker status for 2023 in the Glade-Rigg case?
spk03: Certainly. Thank you. On slide 14, you will see various mechanisms or trackers that the Commission allows to track lost revenues and expenses. These will all become effective January 2023. All but two of them cannot be calculated until the 2021 rate case is finalized and the component parts and pieces are set by the final Commission decision. The first two items, however, the incremental cost balancing account and the conservation balancing account, we settled with public advocates in this case on the component parts of those accounts, and so we're able to calculate those now. The other mechanisms, we'll need to get the final commission decision before we can actually calculate them, but the mechanisms themselves are not in dispute. I believe it goes to you now, Marty.
spk05: Yep.
spk09: Thank you. I want to give everyone an update on where we are with the drought. If everyone has been following the storms during the first quarter of 2023, it's been a wet and wild winter in California. Having said that, you know, a storm really is a drop in the bucket. We had a lot of rain the first two weeks of the year as the atmospheric river hit the West Coast, all up and down the state, which was good news from a water supply perspective. Filled up a lot of the reservoirs in Northern California. And then we had a very, very dry February up until this week where we got more snow and blizzard-like conditions in the Sierras. I think as many of you know, groundwater levels rack very slowly. The seasonal changes in one storm really doesn't kind of change things. Snowpack is very, very healthy right now, well above 100%. But the thing to really watch as we go into the spring is what happens to the snowpack during the month of April. If you remember during April of last year, we lost the majority of our snowpack and melted quickly as the weather warmed up. And that's the part that's really driven by climate change. The other thing I would say is that the economics of water in California haven't changed. You still have 40-plus million people. You're the largest ag-based state in the union. And you have a very strong industrial base being the fourth largest economy in the world. So people get really excited about the storms. We do as well. We're happy to see the rain. But the reality is we're far from that. and how long that snowpack lasts for will become really, really important. Conservation continues, and our customers did a good job. Some of you may have seen we put a press release out earlier this week that our customers had nine straight months of conservation savings. Overall, for Q4 2022, it was 8.2% lower than last year and 17% below adopted. Again, that's the work of the conservation team, all the conservation messaging taking place throughout the state. Our drought expenditures for the quarter were about $500,000. They're recorded in a memorandum account, so they're expensed in the period, but we're allowed to track them. Our total balance in that account is just under $2 million as of right now. So all eyes are on April to see what happens with the snowpack. Hopefully we get more rain and more snow between now and then, but really we have to see how long it lasts. And I think that the big thing that has really changed kind of over the last year TAB, Mark McIntyre, has been the heightened awareness of the issues with the Colorado river and well that doesn't have a per se direct effect on cal water. TAB, Mark McIntyre, It does affect some of our wholesalers in southern California, who we get water from. TAB, Mark McIntyre, And so we will continue to monitor that and obviously our drought efforts work hand in hand with our wholesalers to make sure we have enough supply for southern California. TAB, Mark McIntyre, So there'll be more to come on the drought, as we move into spring. Moving on to page 16, I want to talk a little bit about capital investment. As Tom said, I think the silver lining to what has been a challenging year has been the capital investment. We had a new record of $328 million of total capital invested, which is very, very healthy. Frankly, better than what we thought we would do. Kudos to the procurement, engineering, and operations team for getting that capital on the ground. There are many supply chain challenges during 2022 that we had to overcome to keep that capital flowing. Q4 capital spending increased given the good weather conditions up until the first of the year. And also we've had more capital being invested in our subsidiary companies. We think that's a very, very good sign as our business development endeavors continue to pay off and we add new service connections in other states. We are putting more capital in those other states and bringing those service connections up to our standards. We expect an increase in capital expenditures and non-California utilities during 2023. Again, with our subsidiary companies, we expect that level of capital investment to continue to move up, albeit not as the size of California in terms of total dollars as a percent increases the capital expenditures and the subsidiaries are growing at a very, very healthy clip. And I'll come back and talk about that in a minute when we talk about some BD exercises. If you go over to page 17, Mike Beaucheneau, On the business development side, we have highlighted in yellow kind of what has changed since we last talked. Mike Beaucheneau, And i'll just go through the changes here quickly kia ho and Hawaii, which is a wastewater management system that adds 1500 equipment units are basically 1500 customers. Mike Beaucheneau, To our wastewater base in Hawaii that adds 24% of the connection base for Hawaii operations up in the Pacific Northwest in Washington, we had its gross water. And Bethel Green Acres, they were approved by the WTC in January of this year. That'll add 3% to the customer base for our connections in the state of Washington. And if you go down to the very bottom of the page, Lake Section, New Mexico, we announced in January of 2023 a definitive agreement, and that is being filed with the New Mexico Public News Commission. That'll add 5,000 connections, or 58%, to our connection base. in new mexico so we continue to have good luck on the business development side uh and growing our business outside the state of california and we'll look forward to updating you on these business development endeavors as we move forward in 2023
spk08: Capital Tom, panel review. Thanks. So I'll just give a quick update on our capital investment and rate-based slides on slide 18. We've shown the capital investment for 2022. We continue to achieve CapEx that is three times our depreciation rate. That's now a total of seven years where we've been doing that case of CapEx. And you'll see that, remember, 2023 and 2024, the 2021 general rate case. There have been no changes to slide 19. Again, that's our estimated regulated rate base, particularly as it relates to California. We're awaiting a ruling, as we talked about, that would determine what the regulated rate base is in 2023, as well as 24 and 25. So, Marty, I'll turn this back to you.
spk09: Great. I'm on page 20 for the wrap-up and what's going to happen during 2023 looking forward. First and foremost, as we talked about on this call, not a lot of new news on the cost of capital in the general rate case. We are waiting, as are most of the water utilities in the state of California that are regulated by the PUC. That will create some short-term regulatory uncertainty as we wait for the two key decisions. We continue to work with the Commission and we'll do everything we can to get those decisions out as quickly as possible, but ultimately the ball is in their court. Likewise, as we go into the end of the first quarter, it means the financial reporting is going to be a little bit more challenging because we are officially decoupled from decoupling. But you don't have a rate order that has all your mechanisms laid out yet, as Greg mentioned. So like we've done in previous year GRCs where we have anticipated decoupling, mechanisms and trackers that we think we will be using when ultimately approved, we will provide as much information on kind of both sides of the fence, so to speak. So you can see what the numbers are kind of pre-imposed based on what we think those trackers are going to be. So if we can just ask everyone to bear with us until we get through the two decisions. Once the decision's out, I'll clear a lot of it up. But it will be a little choppy making sense of all this in the interim. while we are no longer decoupled and waiting for a GRC decision that will ultimately approve all attractors, as well as cap structure, cost of capital, et cetera. While we'll stay focused on regulation, clearly we're going to continue making progress in business development. The business development team has been very busy. We have a very full pipeline. We'll also continue to stay focused on risk management and paying attention to our supply chain issues, drought and climate change issues that affect the company long term. We'll be publishing our third ESG report here over the next few weeks. We look forward to sharing that with everyone and the progress we've made on our battles with climate change and what we're doing to ensure sustainability for our customers. Lastly, I wanna deviate a little bit and some of you might be thinking, who in the heck is this Tom Scanlon guy and what in the heck happened to Dave Healy? Dave Healy retired as our corporate controller. Some of you probably saw the 8K last year, it was a planned retirement. So we're lucky to have Tom Scanlon. Tom has an undergraduate degree from finance from Marquette University in Wisconsin and MBA from the University of Illinois. He has a CPA and has a strong background in financial reporting and construction management. So Tom has been our director of financial reporting since 2010. So he has been part of our succession planning process here at Cal Water. Certainly very, very well qualified, and frankly, with a strong background in construction accounting, he was a big add for us when we added him in 2010, since construction and getting capital grant is a big part of what we do. So, Tom, welcome. I also want to note that Justin Scarb was promoted to Vice President of Community and Governmental Affairs. Justin joined KELWAR in 2009. He was promoted to Director in 2017 and became an officer of the company effective January 1st. with Tom Scanlon. Tom, excuse me, Justin has his BS in political science from Arizona State University, a master's in communication from Cal State Hayward, and he's currently finishing up as a Juristocrist, which he expects to have in 2024. Likewise, you may have saw a press release from a couple weeks ago announcing Sean Bunting has joined the company as our Vice President General Counsel. Sean will be replacing Lynn McGee, who will officially retire the end of this month after 19 years of service with the company. Sean has been with American Water Works for 15 years, serving in several various senior leadership roles. Sean has a Law School. He's also a U.S. Marine Corps vet. So officially welcome to Tom, Justin, and Sean. And then lastly, I want to close out by just thanking Lynn and Dave. We've been very blessed at Cal Water to have a smart, thoughtful, and creative leadership team. And although leadership changes are never easy because we all get used to working together, and this has just been a marvelous team to have together for the last number of years without having any changes, We also understand and we encourage people to go retire and enjoy life. One of the great things about working at a company like Cal Water is we do have excellent benefits and excellent retirement program. So as much as change is painful to see our good friends and colleagues go, it's a good thing because it gives people room to move up and succession planning is a core competency of management at the board here at Cal Water that we take very, very seriously. So with Dave and Lynn, we just want to say thank you for all you've done for us over the years. You've been a major part of our team. You will be dearly, dearly missed, and we wish you all the best in your retirement. So with that funding, we want to open it up to questions, please.
spk01: The floor is now open for your questions. To ask a question at this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point you'd like to withdraw from the queue, please press star 1 again. You'll be provided with the opportunity to ask one question and one further follow-up question. We'll now take a moment to render our roster. We have a question from the line of Andy Sarasny from Seaport. Please proceed.
spk00: Thank you. So I wanted to start with the fact that the decoupling mechanism went away, but you are still under the conservation mandate. So again, I'm just trying to understand where the exposure is, right? Because under the conservation mandate, the sales volume or changes in sales forecasts is not something that should impact your earnings. Again, I'm just trying to understand, where is the sensitivity here, given that conservation mandate is still in place?
spk08: Sure, Angie. This is Tom Smagle, and Greg, if you could fill in when I get to the end of my knowledge here. We do have a filed account, one of the accounts that Greg mentioned. It's called the DREMA, which is the drought loss, essentially lost revenue memorandum account. And that is something for the non-decoupled companies like an SJW or some of the other smaller companies. That's been in place with them for some years. It does allow us to track and record lost sales during a declared drought. And so we are in a declared drought right now. Governor Newsom declared the drought a couple of back loss revenue and potentially recover that later. There's a couple of things about that. One is that it's subject to a little bit of an earnings haircut, I think a 20 basis point reduction in ROE associated with that. And then the thing that is unknown at this time, because we've had such a wet winter to date, is whether or when the governor might declare that the drought is over. Now there's obviously, as Marty mentioned, water supply challenges in California, particularly in Southern California at the moment, but the Colorado River supply, we're not sure if and when the governor might declare the drought over, but if and when that happens, that account would no longer track the lost revenue.
spk05: Greg, do you have anything to add to that? No, you hit all the relevant points, Tom.
spk00: Okay, I understand. Secondly, so previously I looked at the fourth quarter slide from previous years. You guys have this slide where you showed us, you know, the simplified math for your earnings. And I understand that this year it's difficult given that you're waiting for, you know, at least two major decisions. But can you actually at least give us a sense, for example, what is the non-California rate base? how should we think about those other drivers as you typically have? Yeah, well, I know that a lot is unknown, but at least what would help us estimate the earnings power for this year?
spk08: Yeah, I think that we don't report in segments. And so from our file documents, it's a little bit difficult to get the non-California rate base. We've described the company as being somewhere between 90 and 92% of our revenue and our businesses in California. And so that would tend to be about true with rate base as well, but I don't have the numbers in front of me and I don't know that we describe them publicly. There is, you know, some of these calculations that are embedded in that number on slide 19, which is the rate base. And I want to say that that follows that pattern as well, where about 90% of that rate base that's being shown there as projected rate base for 23, 4, and 5 is the California rate base. But I can't get into much more detail than that. There are a lot of systems, and unfortunately, the regulations are different in all states. And so in some cases, we have projected rate base. In some cases, we have reported rate base. This gets a little complicated. But California is fairly obvious because it'll be written in the decision what the rate base in California is.
spk00: Okay. And then lastly, on the financing side, so you've been very active with acquisitions of assets. So how are you financing those acquisitions? So that's one. And number two is, what was the actual equity ratio at the California utility at the end of 2022?
spk08: So the answer to the first question is that most of these acquisitions, if you look back to the acquisition slide 17, are relatively small. We've been funding those with corporate cash that's obtained through retained earnings and the ATM equity program, as well as the lines of credit that we have. The biggest acquisition that is on the list currently is probably the Lake section at the very bottom. And we just announced that acquisition, so we actually haven't paid for it yet. And so that will come out of those sources later on. As far as the equity layer at California Water Service Company, I see Tom across the table with me with a calculator. We don't have that. that information right now.
spk00: But if I were to say that it's around 50%, would that be?
spk08: I think, yes. I think as of the third quarter, that was trending upward. And as you know, one of the issues in the cost of capital case was whether the capital structure was appropriate. And it certainly was getting close to 50% as of the third quarter. I remember calculating, but I don't have that number, unfortunately, for year end.
spk00: Okay. Thank you, guys. Thanks.
spk08: Thank you.
spk01: Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Reeder from Wells Fargo. Please proceed.
spk06: Hey, good morning, gentlemen.
spk07: I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on the drivers of the substantial 35% increase in other operating expense. I think it was about $30 million higher than $21 million. Are there items in there that are not likely to recur, or is that a good base to assume 23 grows off of?
spk04: This is Tom Scanlon. I'll answer that. The increase in other operation expense, a good portion of that relates to a requirement of deferral based on accounting guidance that we look at the future and estimate the collection of receivables and anything that's over 24 months, we have to defer the revenue and costs. Each quarter, we re-forecast that out, reverse it, and rebook it. And because of our anticipated collections, we've reversed out revenue and costs, and that's the largest adjustment in the other operations expense. Also, we We record our conservation expense in that category. And since we're at the end of our GRC, we have a conservation balancing account in which there's a number of programs that were accelerated during the final year of our rate case. And again, note that the conservation expenses are covered by a balancing account. We also... had an increase in bad debt expense or the reserve that we take for uncollectible accounts. Mid-year in 2022, we were allowed to begin turning off service for non-payment, but we have a number of accounts that are under review and it's going to take some time to employee to turn off for non-payment. And so those were the primary drivers of the increase in the other operating expense.
spk07: Okay. So it sounds like a lot of that increase, you have an associated kind of revenue impact as well, or revenue increase. That's right. That's correct, Jonathan. Yeah. Okay. And then, you know, I don't know if this is for Marty, but, you know, why... did the board only go at the 4% dividend increase in 23? I know the, it had been increasing it more at like an 8% pace, uh, the last three years and the payout ratio on, you know, at least what should be a normalized EPS hour. Uh, I know 23 is going to be a little messy, but, uh, it's still pretty low, you know, maybe around like 50%. So why did, why did the dividend kind of not, not grow as fast as it has been historically?
spk09: Yeah, good question, Jonathan. Obviously, we keep our payout ratio pegged within a certain band. Clearly, it's just uncertainty right now. We're pending the rate case. We're pending the cap structure. And we think one of the most important things we do as a company, besides serving customers, is getting the capital on the ground. That's the benefit for stockholders as we're growing that rate base. And so, given the uncertainty that we've seen at the Commission, we thought it was more prudent to have a lower dividend increase this year. And, you know, keep plowing that capital back into the ground. And obviously, as things change, we'll reevaluate that. We've increased the dividend every year for the past 70 some odd years. I don't see us kind of changing directions from something like that, but we just felt
spk07: through these two hurdles here with the uh with the california public utilities commission okay thanks for that and then just lastly that lake section uh new mexico uh acquisition is there anything that you can you know disclose in terms of the purchase price or you know associated rate base amount there and is that a deal that you expect to close in 2023
spk09: We think it'll close in 2023. Obviously, we haven't filed it yet with the New Mexico Public Utilities Commission. When we do, we'll be able to talk more about the purchase price. But I will say this, and Jonathan, you know how we are from a business development standpoint. We are value buyers. We're not interested in buying something at three, four, or five times rate base. We look at the cost per connection. We look at how much headroom. our availability there is to invest in that system, to bring them up to our standards, et cetera. So, you know, keep in mind when we look at all our business development efforts, we have a pretty strong value slant on how we buy things. So I think once we file the application with the commission, we'll be able to talk more about it. But until then, I really can't say what the purchase price is. Other than I would say it's not material at all. It's a 5,000 connection system. They're not, you know, really big numbers here that are going to really kind of dent anything.
spk05: Okay, great. No, appreciate those comments, Marty. Thanks. Good luck. Thanks, Jonathan. Our final question comes from the line of Davis Sunderland from Baird. Please proceed. Hey, good morning, everybody.
spk10: And thanks for taking my question, guys.
spk05: Good morning, David.
spk10: Wanted to ask about visibility into the current supply chain environment. I know you guys mentioned maybe having an impact that was greater last quarter than this quarter. It sounds like you overcame some difficulties, but just wanted to ask maybe specifically on lead times for lead piping or anything else significant, and if you think that's going to have any impact on the capital investment this year. Now I have a brief follow-up.
spk09: Sure. Well, I think I got supply chain tattooed on my arm when team and the engineering team throughout the last two years. First, we're not buying any lead pipe. Let me just make the record straight. There's no lead pipe. We have seen substantial changes in lead time requirements for ductile iron, PVC, et cetera. And those look like they may have peaked in the third to fourth quarter. So, you know, ductile iron used to be able to order it, you know, four to six weeks out and you'd be fine and it'd show up at a job site. In some cases, it's up to a yearly time now. So part of what happens behind that, and I've met with the majority of our suppliers, is they cannot ramp up production that quickly at their plant sites. So, you know, they try to match their supply with the demand and not have overcapacity because the cost and their margins are fairly tight. But we are seeing the suppliers ramp up production. It's been about 12 months coming. They started working on it early on. So we're seeing some of that production come into queue, which is going to speed things up. The other thing that has helped tremendously is we have been a consistent buyer of that pipe from our wholesalers. And so those relationships really make a difference when there's been a kind of a scramble and everyone out there trying to buy stuff that we've gotten bumped up to the top of the list because of our relationships and our consistency of ordering goods and services from certain vendors. So I think we've peaked. I think it's starting to get better. We have seen a pretty big increase in some of the costs. We've seen increases in our year-over-year inventory balance as well. So as we found excess supply available, the team would grab it and we would go store it. So, you know, I think it's easy to talk about our earnings call, but the reality is that the procurement team and the engineering team really did a fantastic job. And if you go back and listen to our earnings calls through last year, we were softly saying, it's a tough year for capital. It's a tough year for capital. It's a tough year for capital. And clearly it was, but in the fourth quarter, we had a record fourth quarter earnings. which resulted in a record year. The team has done a fantastic job. We are seeing price increases, obviously, with all the inflationary pressures as well. But I think we're managing through it, and I hope we're through the worst of it. The indications I've seen so far is that it's starting to get a little bit better now. So barring any other major disruptive global event, I think we'll be on the downside of the problem, and hopefully things will start leveling up.
spk05: Thank you. That is helpful.
spk10: And my follow-up question would just be about the business development project pipeline. Obviously, very excited to hear about New Mexico and just wanted to ask if there's anything in particular that you are, to the extent you can share, of course, that you are looking into or weighing options as far as water versus wastewater or certain geographies that are more attractive. Any details there would be great. Thank you very much.
spk09: Sure. Very good question. Obviously, well, Rebecca, So at 50,000 feet, we've closed deals in all five states, including Texas. So I think that the market continues to be decent. The pipeline continues to be full. Sellers' expectations and buyers' expectations, that's always where the challenge is going to be. We're doing deals on both sides, water and wastewater. We've had very good growth in Obviously, in the state of California and in the state of Washington, it's been more kind of water systems. In Hawaii and Texas, it's been more wastewater systems. So we're growing on both sides of it, and it just depends on where the market is and where the growth is happening. As I mentioned to Jonathan's question, we're very kind of value-focused on a system. We're not interested in buying a system and overpaying for it. and then not having the ability to invest more capital into that system. And that is a lose-lose situation for stockholders and for our companies. So we like to buy it on a value basis where we got room to invest, make capital improvements, bring somebody up to our operating standards. And then the selling shareholder of the entity gets their buyout. We get the asset at a fair price. start generating a rate of return. So I'm still kind of bullish on the BD side. Obviously, inflation is going to be a factor in what happens with the economy in 2023. But the BD team has been hot, and it's been hot in all five states. And I don't see our momentum slowing down. And having said that, these aren't really big deals either. But obviously, they're big deals to the subsidiary companies because they're growing exponentially with So I think 23 is going to be another decent year for business development, barring any global catastrophic kind of changes in the market.
spk05: Thank you for the call. Right. Thank you.
spk01: I would now like to turn the call over to Martin Kropelnicki for closing remarks.
spk09: Great.
spk01: Thanks, Bundy.
spk09: Well, obviously, as we move into the first quarter, all eyes are on the California Public Utilities Commission resolving the cost of capital and getting a PD out and hopefully getting a general rate case decision out sometime in 2023. The other two things we're focused on clearly is our Supreme Court case with the California Supreme Court on decoupling. And then, as I mentioned earlier, everybody watch the snowpack. That's going to be your key to answering questions about the drought, what happens to the snowpack during the month of April. So with that, thanks for joining us for another year-end conference call. We appreciate everyone's support, and we'll look forward to updating everyone at the end of the first quarter, the end of April. Thank you very much. Have a great day.
spk01: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer