California Water Service Group

Thank you for standing by. My name is Kathleen and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the California Water Service Group third quarter 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. And if you would like to withdraw your question, just press the star one again. Thank you. And now I would like to turn the call over to Jim Lynch, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Kathleen. Welcome, everyone, to our third 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. 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 December 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 third quarter 2024 results, I'd like to take a few moments to address 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 interested parties, to carefully read and understand the company's disclosures on risks and uncertainties found in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Qs, press releases, and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I'll turn the call over to Marty.

Thanks, Jim. Good morning, everyone, and happy Halloween. We're happy you can join us here today. We're very pleased to share with you our results for the third quarter of 2024. There's really five main topics that we want to cover today, the first one being our strong third quarter financial performance that continues to benefit from the regulatory relief in the state of California. We want to give an update on the 2024 general rate case where during the quarter we had our initial pre-conference hearing and we've been assigned an administrative law judge and a commissioner to oversee our case. We received approval of certain advice letters from the California Public Utilities Commission that's going to allow us to collect $94.2 million in certain regulatory balances through 2027. We'll want to talk about the record amount of capital that we've invested this year and what that looks like going into year end. And then lastly, take a moment to talk about our continued environmental leadership and corporate recognition and talk about a few awards that we won during the quarter. But to start things off, let's do like we typically do and have Jim Lynch take you through some of the financial analysis that highlights the quarterly results. Jim, back to you. Thanks, Marty.