Good morning. My name is Chrystal and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Chesapeake Utilities first quarter financial results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to hand the conference over to Beth Cooper. Please go ahead ma’am.

Thank you, and good morning, everybody. I’d like to welcome you to our first quarter 2016 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Mike McMasters, President and CEO. And in addition to Mike, we’re joined by other members of our management team. For those on the phone today, we’re actually hosting today’s call live from Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland. The call is being held within the Perdue School of Business, so as Mike and I are alumni of that school, and we owe special thanks to Dr. William [ph] for enabling us to have the call here today, and included within our meeting we have members of the local financial community here in Salisbury. We have a board member. We have distinguished faculty and also many students here in the room. We are very happy here as I said. As usual today, presentation can be found on our website under the Investors section, the Events and Webcasts subsection or you can access our presentation via our IR app. One of the things I maybe like to point out on Page 1 of presentation, when trying to think about the themes and typically at the beginning of each year, we try to look at what are themes going to be for this as presentation. I pulled something from actually Mike’s President Letter in the annual report and basically within his letter he talks about that we’re driving growth by focusing on long-term sustainable growth opportunities. And hopefully today you will see that that’s really been the case our past – in terms of our past success, as well as what we think in terms of our future opportunities for continued earnings and dividend growth. Turning to Slide 2, this is the typical forward looking and other disclosures section. This presentation…

Thanks, Beth. I guess I want to turn to Slide 13, 14 I guess – Slide 14, I am going to start talking about our strategic platform for growth. This is a pretty important slide for us as a company. We actually show this to our employees quite a bit, in addition to our board of directors and investors. We start at the bottom and work our way up engagement strategies, basically what we are trying to do is to get our employees more engaged in the company's efforts. And we do that by allowing them, I guess, the opportunity to get more engaged in the communities that we’re serving. And so what we're finding. I guess, with our efforts to do that is that we're getting -- I'm going to say -- improved community relations. We're getting improved productivity and therefore improved growth. And one of the key things that we have to do as a company, I guess, the first job really is safety. And so if we can maintain a safe system, we can maintain a reliable system, we take care of our customers and the communities, then we’re positioned for growth. Without those strategic ingredients, growth becomes more difficult. It's fairly easy to sell services when they look at your track record and see that you're doing – you’re in a very good development. The next step in the process, moving up the triangle, is developing new business lines and executing existing business unit growth. You think about a utility -- as the utility matures, it becomes more and more difficult to grow, and you will see that a lot in the electric industry today. And so what we're having to do is, so let’s think about things differently. Let's not just stick to the same…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Nathan Martin with BB&T Capital Markets.

Good morning everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess, first just kind of given the current gas LDC M&A environment and obviously your clear goals to grow, would it be reasonable to assume you guys would execute possibly another deal or two by the end of this year? And kind of – if so, you mentioned you're continuing to look at opportunities outside of your current territories. Are there any certain types of geographies you're prioritizing, or would you basically consider anything if the returns and strategic fit are there?

I guess, let me do the first question first. When it comes to acquisitions, we are constantly looking for acquisitions. And you know how that works, you have a hard time, that you can look at it, 10, 100 -- you look at a lot of acquisitions. And it's very difficult to get anyone in particular to the finish line. And so forecasting out is just extremely difficult to do that. At least we just don't do that but we are looking at several opportunities in that regard and we’re probably -- always will be looking at several opportunities. You know that, funnel when you have that first – the top piece of the funnel, and you'll have a lot of things in there that fully won’t come to fruition. Very few actually get through. So we can't really forecast that. I'm trying to think the second question now.

Basically as far as geographies -- you guys are continuing to look at opportunities outside of your current territory –

There's maybe a natural tendency for us to be focusing on primarily the East Coast. We've been in Florida since the 80s, and so we are comfortable in Florida. And when we’re comfortable in Florida, that we're going to be comfortable as we look to Georgia et cetera, in contiguous states. And we've got -- I think primarily the focus is on the East Coast. If we saw something good that was East Coast – I am including Ohio in the East Coast, in that definition. As we get much further west of Ohio it maybe becomes – I don’t know, we’re having seen anything over there actually, so we don't spend whole lot of time looking that far west. But that's not to say that tomorrow if we don’t find something that's attractive and strategic fit that we would look at it.

Thanks for that color. And then just in the same vein, I mean, looking at these opportunities, just trying to figure out where you lean more towards regulated, unregulated, or again is it just come down to strategic fit?

We are a different right -- the regulated and unregulated. Aspire Energy of Ohio has basically gathering system delivering gas to either interstate pipelines or delivering gas to LDCs. And so we're perfectly comfortable in that business. There is some commodity risk associated with that business. But we’re comfortable with that. So it is not whether it's regulated or unregulated, it’s really what’s the opportunity and the strategic fit. End of &A

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to President and CEO Mike McMasters.

Thanks everyone for joining us on the call today and for your interest in Chesapeake Utilities. We're here in Salisbury with members of local community at our meeting, and want to thank Salisbury University again for allowing us to use their facilities. We're proud of what our team has accomplished for shareholders in the past and remain committed to working hard to deliver superior shareholder returns in the future. Thank you.

This does conclude today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.