California Water Service Group

Thank you for standing by. My name is Dina. I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the California Water Service Group Q2 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to James Lynch, Senior Vice President, CFO and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Dee. Welcome everyone to our second quarter 2024 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Milliman, Vice President of Rates and Regulatory Affairs. A replay dial-in information for this call can be found in our quarterly results earnings release, which was issued earlier today. The replay will be available until September 30th, 2024. As a reminder, before we begin, the company has a slide deck to accompany today's earnings call. The slide deck was furnished with an 8K and is also available at the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at second 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 risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from the company's current expectations. As a result, the company strongly advises all current shareholders as well as interest 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. I will now turn the call over to Marty to start us off.

Great. Thank you, Jim. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us here today. It's been a busy quarter, and we have a number of items we want to update you on today. First, I'm going to ask Jim to give you an update on our financial performance for the quarter. And I'll just lead into that by saying what a difference a year makes. Last year, no rate relief. This year, getting the 21 rate case finally concluded and on the books, it's made a big difference. I'll also ask Jim to include some of the highlights of our capital program for 2024 infrastructure improvement plan. We have Greg Millman here today to talk about the filing of the 2024 general rate to 2027. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the recent California Supreme Court decision that protects water utilities' rights to due process and preserves decoupling. Spend some time talking about emergency response. If you've watched the fires in California, it's been a very busy fire season so far this year, so we want to give you an update on the current fires as well as our community outreach efforts to continually improve our process in which we help first responders fight fires. Give an update on the PFOS and the ongoing remediation activities the company has planned for the next three years. Give you an update on our business development activities and what's going on there. And we conclude talking about ESG and our recent ESG report that was published in May. So before giving you the operational update, I'm going to turn it back over to Jim to give an update on the financial results for the quarter of the year to date. Jim?