California Water Service Group

Good morning, everyone. This is John, the conference operator for today. We're just holding for a few minutes before start time. Please hold on. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the California Water Service Group Q4 and year-end 2023 earnings call. I would now like to introduce you to David Hilly, Principal Financial Officer for California Water Service Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, John. Welcome, everyone, to the 2023 year and fourth quarter results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki. our Chairman and CEO, Jim Lynch, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, and Greg Milliman, our Vice President, Rates and Regulatory Affairs Officer. Replay dial-in information for this call can be found in our quarterly results release, which was issued earlier today. The replay will be available until April 29th, 2024. As a reminder, before we begin, the company has a slide deck to accompany the earnings call today. The slide deck was furnished with an 8K yesterday afternoon and is also available at the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at the 2023 year, and fourth quarter results, we'd like to take a few moments 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 Commission. And now I'll turn it over to Martin.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We have a little bit of a bigger group today going through the results for year end. As many of you know, Dave Healy stepped in as our interim chief financial officer. Dave Healy is wrapping up the year with me. He'll be certifying the financials as the principal financial officer. So Dave and I will be signing the 10K essentially for the company. And hopefully everyone's seen the press release after conducting a nationwide search We ended up hiring someone in our own backyard, Jim Lynch. And Jim has joined our company as our Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer. I think many of you know Jim from his time at HKW. What many of you probably don't know is Jim was the audit partner on our account for a number of years going back to when I joined the company. And so I've had the privilege of working with Jim for the last 18 years. And I'm very glad that he's joined our company as our senior vice president, who's DFO. So Jim will be picking up part of the presentation today, but he doesn't get to start certifying the financials until that Q1, Q gets filed in April. So that's the plan for today. And then we have Greg Millman here today to help talk about what's going on with the rates delay, which is probably the big topic of the day. is the continued delay in the 2021 general rate case. And as you'll see, we were unable to conclude what was reasonable to book based on a PD and an APD being issued. And so we're going to talk about that throughout the program here today. So let's go ahead and jump into the financials with Dave, and then we will be going back and forth as we present different parts of the presentation. And then I'll conclude with some closing thoughts and then we'll open up the Q&A. So, Dave, I'm going to hand it back to you.