California Water Service Group

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the 2026 Second Quarter California Water Service Group Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star one on your touchstone phone and to withdraw your question, please press star one again. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Mr. James Dish, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thank you, Janine. Welcome, everyone, to the second quarter 2026 results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Martin Kropelnicki, our Chairman and CEO. Replay, dial, and 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 September 28, 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.cowwatergroup.com. Before looking at our second quarter 26 results, I'd like to cover some forward-looking statements. During the call, we may make certain forward-looking statements, and because these statements deal with future events, They are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our 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-Qs, press releases, and the other reports we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

And now, I'll turn the call over to Marty to provide a brief overview. Thanks, Jim. Good morning, everyone. Consistent with our past earnings call, I'm going to give you a quick overview of the agenda, and then Jim and I are going to jump into some of the details for the quarter. There's only kind of six items on the agenda today that we want to go through. Starting, obviously, in the second quarter, the end of April, we received a decision on our California general rate case. As part of that decision, during the quarter, we recognized our FIRMA, which is the balancing account that takes the retroactive portion of the rate case back to January 1st. This rate case was close to being on time, which is very good news. It was, you know, approximately 90 to 100 days delayed, but we are made whole back to the original date of January 1st. That was recognized in the quarter as well as other items that Jim will be talking about. In addition, during the quarter, we reached this full settlement in our rate case up in Washington. I'll provide some more details about that when we get to that slide. During the second quarter, we had record capital. We invested a record $276 million in new plant for the first six months of the year. That continues to move ahead, especially as we start to invest in our PFAS treatment programs throughout our service territory. And to partially offset that growth, we did raise about $88 million for our ATM or at-the-markets. Stock Program, and the company declared us 326th quarterly consecutive dividend of 33.5 shares. In addition to the quarter, we continue to work on our Nexus integration plans. Nexus has been great to work with, and things are progressing there. We'll give you some more details on that. And then lastly, for those of you that like to look at some of the numbers on sustainability and some of our ESG numbers, we did publish our water quality and sustainability reports as well as receive a number of awards during the quarter. And later on towards the end, I'll introduce the two new officers. As some of you may know, Greg Milleman is not here. As you remember at the last call, that was his last call with us, and he retired, officially retired from the company. And I'll be talking a little bit about his reprises as well as one of the key promotions we had during the quarter. So that's the agenda for today. Jim, why don't I turn it over to you, and we'll go through the numbers.