California Water Service Group

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator. Today's conference is scheduled to begin momentarily. Until that time, your lines will again be placed on music hold. Thank you for your patience. Music Thank you. you Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the California Water Service Group second quarter 2025 earnings call. All lines has 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, again, press star one. I would now like to turn the conference over to James Lynch, Senior Vice President, CFO, and Treasurer. You may begin.

Thank you, Jericho. Welcome, everyone, to the second quarter 2025 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki, our Chairman and CEO, and Shillen Patel, our Chief Business Development Officer and Vice President of our Texas subsidiary, TWSC. Replay dial-in information for this call can be found in our quarterly results earnings release, which was issued earlier today. The call replay will be available until September 29, 2025. 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 on the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at our second quarter 2025 results, I'd like to cover forward-looking statements. During our call, we 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, we strongly advise all current shareholders and interested parties to carefully read the company's disclosures on risks and uncertainties found in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, press releases, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I'll turn the call over to Marty.

Thank you, Jim. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today. We have six main items on the agenda that we want to cover today with everyone and provide an update on. One, we want to talk about the strong performance during the second quarter. Just to remind everyone, earnings look pretty wonky And as we have been saying on every earnings call, it's really driven by the fact that the 2021 general rate case was 16 months late. So when it was finally approved in 2024, it was retroactive. So that's kind of like the boa constrictor and the egg. Because it was retroactive, it's kind of made earnings look kind of funky year to year. I think kind of the punchline from an earnings perspective is when you look at the non-GAAP EPS, non-GAAP earnings per share, we're up 15% year over year. which is historically very, very good considering it's the third year of the rate case in California, which is our largest operating entity. Secondly, we will give an update on our capital program. Capital spending was up approximately 7%, kind of quarter over quarter, and we'll give you an update on where we are with the California general rate case. In addition, we have a new person attending us today, not new to the company, who's been around a long time, but new to helping give an update to our stockholders. Shilam Patel, who is a lead executive officer who heads up our business development activities and is also running our Texas operations for us. So Shilam will give you an update on what's going on in Texas, as well as an exciting new contract we entered into in California and Silverwood, which is a new development that's being built in Southern California. We'll give you a quick update on where we are with PFAS. That's been a little bit of a political football, but we remain steadfast in our approach. and making sure that the drinking water we provide our customers are safe and in compliance with our requirements. And then lastly, you know, we did recently get reaffirmed our very good A-plus stable rating from S&P Global. So we're very happy to see that we've maintained a very strong credit rating going into the second half of the year. So with that, Jim, I'm going to turn it over to you so you can go through the financial results for the quarter, please.