Republic Services, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Republic Services first quarter 2019 investor conference call. Republic Services is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RSG. All participants in today's call will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star, then 2. Please note, this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Nicole Giandonotto, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. I would like to welcome everyone to Republic Services' first quarter 2019 conference call. Don Slager, our president and CEO, John VanderArk, our COO, and Chuck Sirianni, our CFO, are joining me as we discuss our performance. I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that some of the information we discuss on today's call contains forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, and may be materially different from actual results. Our SEC filings discuss factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The material that we discuss today is time sensitive. If in the future you listen to a rebroadcast or recording of this conference call, you should be sensitive to the date of the original call, which is April 25, 2019. Please note that this call is the property of Republic Services, Inc. Any redistribution, retransmission, or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Republic Services is strictly prohibited. I want to point out that our SEC filings, our earnings press release, which includes the GAAP reconciliation table, and the discussion of business activities, along with a recording of this call, are all available on Republic's website at republicservices.com. I want to remind you that The public management team routinely participates in investor conferences. When events are scheduled, the dates, times, and presentations are posted on our website. Finally, I'd like to point out that in our 8K filings, we've included a table that reflects changes in average yields and volume as a percentage of total revenue by line of business. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Don.

Thanks, Nicole. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are very pleased with our strong start to the year. We continue to realize the benefits of executing our strategy of profitable growth through differentiation, which includes strengthening our market position, attracting and retaining the best people, enhancing the customer experience to increase willingness to pay, and leveraging our scale and technology to drive additional efficiencies in our business. As a result, in the first quarter, both earnings and free cash flow were in line with our expectations. Through strong pricing, we were able to offset a one cent headwind from lower than anticipated recycled commodity prices. For the full year, we are reaffirming our adjusted EPS and adjusted free cash flow guidance, assuming current economic conditions continue. The strong momentum in our business will enable us to offset the additional six cent headwind from lower than anticipated recycling commodity prices. In the first quarter, we continued our balanced approach to capital allocation to increase long-term shareholder value. We invested $86 million in acquisitions. We sustained this momentum into the second quarter and have invested an additional $56 million for a total of $142 million of investment to date. This puts us on track to outpace our original acquisition guidance of $200 million. We now expect to invest approximately $300 million for the full year. During the quarter, we also returned $233 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. I'll now turn the call over to John to discuss our first quarter operating performance. John?