UNITIL Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Uniteil Corporation first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on the listening mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star one on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference up to you speaker for today, Mr. Todd Diggins, Director of Finance. So you may begin.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us to discuss Uniswil Corporation's first quarter 2020 financial results. With me today are Tom Meissner, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Larry Brock, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Dan Hurstak, Controller, and Todd Black, Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Customer Relations. We will discuss financial and other information about our first quarter results on this call. As we mentioned in the press release announcing the call, we have posted that information including a presentation to the investors section of our website at www.unitil.com. We will refer to that information during this call. On slide two, the comments made today about future operating results or future events are forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those predicted. Statements made in this call should be considered together with cautionary statements and other information contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents we have filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of today and we assume no duty to update them. This presentation contains non-GAAP measures. The accompanying supplemental information more fully describes these non-GAAP measures and includes a reconciliation to the nearest GAAP measures. The company believes these non-GAAP measures are useful in evaluating its performance. Moving on to slide three, before we start, I'd like to introduce some recent changes in senior management. Larry Brock was recently appointed as senior vice president, chief financial officer, and treasurer. Larry has been with Unitil for over 25 years, serving most recently as chief accounting officer and controller. Larry has vast experience and ensures strong leadership to guide Unitil forward. Dan Hurstak has also joined the management team as the company's new controller. Dan has nearly 20 years of accounting experience, most recently serving as Vice President, Corporate Accounting for Fidelity Investments. Prior to that, Dan worked for 15 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I will now turn the call over to Chairman, President, and CEO, Tom Meissner.

Thank you, Todd, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'm going to begin on slide five. But first, let me just say that our thoughts and sympathies are with the victims of the coronavirus and their families. This is a very difficult time for our customers and communities, and our highest priority continues to be the safety of our employees and that of our customers. In response to the ongoing pandemic, we implemented our crisis response plan to execute preventative and proactive measures during this unprecedented time. We are pleased that there's been no interruption or degradation in our customer service as a result of this emergency, and no impact on our ability to provide safe and reliable service. The gas and electric services we provide are more essential today than they've ever been before for our customers and our communities. To help our customers during this difficult time, we've suspended all service disconnections and late payment fees. In addition, we've created a fund to provide financial assistance to residential customers who've suffered COVID-19 related job loss or reduced wages. In total, we've donated $225,000 to agencies within our service areas to help relief efforts. We also have an employee fundraising campaign ongoing that has raised additional funding for COVID-19 relief efforts. We've seen strong response from our employees. Operationally, the company has continued to provide safe and reliable service throughout this ongoing emergency. We quickly adopted protocols to ensure social distancing in the field while ensuring operational continuity. Office workers have seamlessly transitioned from work to home where appropriate, and even with employees working remotely, we continue to answer customer inquiries and have seen no decline in the level of service. On top of the ongoing COVID-19 emergency, we also successfully responded to two storm events that created widespread outages in our service areas, and we were able to do so and restore service quickly following each event. Our employees have risen to this extraordinary challenge, and the company as a whole remains prepared and ready to adapt. Larry will speak to the financial impacts of the COVID-19 situation momentarily. Moving to slide 6, today we announced net income of $15.2 million or $1.02 per share for the first quarter of 2020, which was a decrease of $11.3 million or $0.76 per share compared to 2019. In the first quarter of 2019, the company recognized a one-time net gain of $9.8 million or $0.66 in EPS on the company's divestiture of its non-regulated business unit, USource. Adjusting for this divestiture gain, net income was down $1.5 million or $0.10 per share compared to 2019 and reflects warmer winter weather in 2020. The company estimates that the warmer than normal winter weather negatively impacted net income by approximately $3.1 million or $0.20 per share. On slide 7, we again summarize our current five-year investment plan. This outlook has not changed from what was reported last quarter and we do not currently anticipate that the COVID-19 emergency will materially impact our 2020 investment plan. We still expect to invest over $680 million in our gas and electric systems over the next five years, which is an increase of over 25% compared to the previous five years. This investment will continue to fund gas infrastructure modernization, gas system expansion, and Electric Grid Modernization. This investment should maintain our historical rate-based growth of 7.5% to 8.5% over the foreseeable future. Finally, on slide 8, we previously announced that we increased our annual dividend to $1.50 per share. We do not currently foresee any change to our current dividend policy as a result of the COVID-19 emergency. However, we will continue to strategically analyze our dividend policy subject to EPS growth and financing needs. Now I'll turn the call over to Larry who will take us through the numbers.