California Water Service Group

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the California Water Service Group first quarter 2026 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 will now turn the conference over to James Lynch, Senior Vice President. You may begin.

Thank you, Demi. Welcome everyone to our first quarter 2026 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Marty Kropelnicki, our Chairman and CEO, and Greg Milliman, our Vice President of Rates and Regulatory Affairs. Replay dial-in information for the call can be found in our quarterly results earnings release, which was issued earlier today. The call replay will be available until June 29th, 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 first quarter 2026 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, Forms 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, and thank you for joining us this morning to review our first quarter of 2026. There's really six primary areas that we want to talk about today, the first one being obviously the quarter, and I would say Q1 results were in line with our expectations given the fact we had a delayed 2024 general rate case. And to remind everyone, in March, we did get a proposed decision, and there's a comment period that follows that proposed decision, which is 30 days. Our comments were filed. And then yesterday, we received what's called a revised proposed decision that I've asked Greg to talk about a little bit more in detail later on in our discussion today. I will generally say that the revised proposed decision we're very happy with, and we are on the docket today for approval at the California Public Utilities Commission. In terms of the quarter, again, given the delay of the rate case, there was stuff we could not book because of the delay. But given where we are in line with expectations, I think the highlight of the quarter is the fact that our infrastructure investment for the first quarter was up 17%, and we continue to make good progress on our PFAS treatment and cost recovery from the polluters who polluted the grounds and the waters that we treat. On the business development side, there's really two areas. Obviously, we remain focused on the Nexus acquisition deal, as well as we have filed our change of control applications in Texas to advance our purchasing of a minority interest in BVRT, which is the Texas partnership that we've been involved in for the last five years. Yesterday at our board of directors meeting, our board declared our 325th consecutive quarterly dividend, and that follows, of course, the 59th annual dividend increase that we had in January. Additionally, as I mentioned on our year-end earnings call, we have officially kicked off our centennial year of operations, which means we've been going out to the regions that we operate doing employee and customer celebrations, which has gotten off to a very, very good start. I'll talk a little bit more about that later on today. Before we get into some of the details in these six subject areas, I'm going to turn it over to Jim to actually go through the financial results Jim, I'm going to hand it off to you, please.