California Water Service Group

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the California Water Service Group first quarter 2024 earnings call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen mode only. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for question and answer. This call is being recorded. I'd like to turn the call over to Jim Lynch, Senior Vice President, CFO, and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ellie. Welcome everyone to our first quarter 2024 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Krumplnicki, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Milliman, Vice President of Rates and Regulatory Affairs. Replay dial-in information for this call can be found in our quarterly results release, which was issued earlier today. A replay of the call will be available until Monday, June 24, 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 and is also available at the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at the first quarter 2024 results, I'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 are subject to various risk 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 risks and uncertainties found in our forms 10-K, 10-Q, press releases, and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I will turn the call over to Marty.

Thank you, Jim. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today to talk about our Q1 2024 results. We have a number of topics to cover today, starting with our strong operational performance, which is really highlighted by the final resolution of the 2021 general rate case. And I will say it's after going through the delays, which stretched out over 2023, it's nice to see the arrows all going in the right direction. And big kudos to Jim and the team for booking everything and getting it all set up here as we wrap up Q1. In addition, we'll want to talk about the implementation of the water cost to capital adjustment mechanism, which sets our return on equity for 2024 at 10.27%. We were able to secure an additional $83 million of COVID funds from the state of California to help our customers with past due balances that linger from our COVID times. And then talk about our, where we are with PFAS and the EPA's new regulation and our plans to be in compliance with that. And then finally wrap up talking about the commitment we made recently to reduce our scope one and scope two admissions. But prior to going into some of these more operational themes, I'm going to turn it back over to Jim to review the financial results for the first quarter of 2024. Jim? Thank you, Marty.