California Water Service Group

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Desiree and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the California Water Service Group Q4 2025 and full year 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 redraw your question again, press the star one. I would now like to turn the conference over to James Lynch, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thank you, Desiree. Welcome, everyone, to the fourth quarter and full year 2025 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki, our Chairman and CEO, Shillen Patel, our Chief Business Development Officer, and Greg Milliman, our Vice President of Rates and Regulatory Affairs. Replay dialing information for this call. can be found in our quarterly results earnings release, which was issued yesterday. The call replay will be available until April 27, 2026. 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 fourth quarter 2025 results, I'd like to cover forward-looking statements. During our call, we may make certain forward-looking statements, and 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.

Thanks, Jim. Good morning, everyone. I can't think of a more appropriate way to kick off our 100th year of operations as an essential utility than by quickly talking about two deals we announced. First and foremost, yesterday we executed an agreement to purchase the Nevada and Oregon operations from Nexus Water. We've been busy working with them over the last few months to put that deal together, and we'll be talking about the deal later on today. Secondly, in December, we announced we've reached an agreement to purchase the outstanding minority interest in the Texas joint venture that we helped start, BBRT Holdings, and become the sole owner of seven Texas water and wastewater utilities. So big news that continues to allow us to expand our geographical footprint and further split us solidify our position as a leader in the water industry in the western U.S. In addition, while we don't have a general rate case for the 2024 rate case for California yet, we know it is actively being worked on and we expect to get a rate decision here soon. It's a little different situation than what we're in in the 21 rate case where there was a lot of silence based on what we're seeing, on where the commissioner is in the process, the questions they're asking And we know it's a priority within the commission to get that done soon. In addition, during the quarter, we filed and we're expecting a decision for our consolidated rate case in Texas. And we've also filed a rate case in the state of Washington. So we'll talk about that more a little bit later. So if I can get everyone to go to page five, please. We'll do a quick recap on what we did for the year. So first and foremost, we went into the fourth quarter really ahead of budget and performing well. But I think as many of you saw, we had a major storm on the West Coast in December. And the financial results in December were clearly affected by wet, cold weather. This is really the second time we've had an atmospheric river that really kind of hits the whole West Coast. Normally, if you think about California, it's kind of a long state. And while we might get wet weather in Northern California, you know, demand for water services stay high in Southern California because it tends to be warmer. This is one of those storms that was from all the way from the Canadian border all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Baja Coast on the California side. So we had a pretty big weather impact that Jim will be talking about later. So overall, you know, our results in the fourth quarter softened in December really because of these storms. As a highlight for 2025, we invested a record $517 million into our infrastructure systems, and that includes an additional $52.3 million invested in the fourth quarter alone. In 2025, we increased our annual dividend by a record 10.7%, and that was filed by our 59th annual dividend increase earlier this year in 2026 by an additional 8%. We received during the fourth quarter our extension for our cost of capital in the state of California, which allows us to retain a 10.27 ROE until January 2028. I believe this is one of the highest ROEs of a water utility in North America. And we have received approval to increase interim rates by the commission. So when the decision didn't come out In December, the Commission gave us the green light to implement an interim rate increase of 3% that we implemented in January in California. So overall, kind of a busy year from that perspective on the rate side. And in addition to that, we also maintained our A-plus stable credit rating from S&P, which I believe is one of the highest rated credit utilities in North America. So there's a lot to get into in the details, so I'm going to turn it back to Jim to go through some of the details on the financial results. Jim?