Good morning. My name is Denise, and I'll be facilitating today's call. I'd now like to turn the call over to Beth Cooper. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'd first like to thank those that are joining us on the call today and then, secondly, thank those in the room for today we're doing our earnings conference call live from Delaware State University, in our hometown in Dover, Delaware. And we appreciate so many -- the faculties, the deans, so many -- those individuals being able to join us as well as it's a great opportunity for us to be able to get out and work with the university in these types of settings. I'm going to begin today's call first. Moving to Slide 2. I know everyone on the call is familiar. We have our standard disclosures around forward-looking statements. Certainly, I would refer everyone to the forward-looking information that we provide in our Form 10-K. We will talk about various projections, but you should always look at those in light of those disclosures that we provide around those in our public documents. We thought, today, a good place to start the call, we had quite a few questions from the financial community, will be to discuss the most recent hurricane, Hurricane Matthew, and what impact that may have had, if any, on the company. And so I'm going to turn our call over to Mike McMasters, President and CEO who will discuss that.

Thank you, Beth. I mentioned earlier that we didn't have a hurricane a little while ago, and I just want to bring everybody up to what's happened. There's been a lot of questions about this. There was a lot -- a tremendous amount of work that was done upfront to prepare for the hurricane. I'm skipping over that just to kind of -- in the interest of time here. But basically, I'm just picking up from when the hurricane was, I guess, quickly approaching the island. We had a mandatory evacuation on Amelia Island at 6 a.m. on Thursday. We shut down our combined heat power plant on the island shortly thereafter. So the hurricane impacts from Thursday, October 6 to Saturday, October 8. On a Saturday morning at 8:30, our trucks were lined up at the bridge to get back on the island to go check out the facilities and get customers turned back on service they since have lost. Our trucks were actually the first group of people back on the island. We lined up early. And since the Board of -- Department of Transportation ruled that the bridge was safe, we drove across the island and started over. When we got there, we've been on to 90% of our electric customers without power. There, of course, have been minimal damage done to our natural gas propane systems, no damage to the storm hardened transmission poles, no damage to our Florida Public Utilities operations centered on the island. This is a pretty big deal. There's a lot of stuff that has been done over the last 5 or 6 years to our Florida Public Utilities to strengthen the -- focus on the island, to make this more able to withstand storms. The most important thing, I can't --…

Now, really, just to dig in and take a look at the financial results, first beginning with the quarter. Turning to Slide 10 for those on the phone. For the quarter, we reported $4.4 million of net income, which basically represents $0.29 per share. Recall and I know many of those on the phone know that the third quarter for us in terms of overall contribution for the company is typically the lowest when you look at where and when our earnings fall due to the seasonality of our businesses. The $0.29 for the quarter that Mike mentioned, there's a lot of growth in here, though, that really is going on that we want to highlight and walk you through. So turning to Slide 11, beginning with our Regulated Energy segment. That segment had higher gross margin of about $4.7 million that ultimately translated into about $1.3 million of increased operating income. It didn't really come from just one area, though. And consistent with what we've been talking about for the last several quarters, there were multiple areas where we had growth as well in the company. First and foremost, included our natural gas expansions that we made on the transmission and distribution side. Those generated about $1.6 million in terms of incremental margins. Above and beyond that, we had $943,000 of new customer growth. That's customer growth in our distribution operations as well as additional margin that we're generating in our transmission operations. We also generated $920,000 incremental margin from our Gas Reliability and Infrastructure Program. That's a gas pipe replacement program that's been in place since August of 2012 in Florida. By the end of this year, we'll have invested close to $100 million in that program. So very substantial in terms of the contribution that it's making…

Okay. I guess, you already have seen this slide, Slide 21. So I'm going to skip over that. We're trying to do things pretty quickly. Eight Flags, we talked about that a lot -- a little bit earlier. I'm just going to skip over this thing and just mention a couple of things. One, $40 million investment in the project, annual margin is expected to be with some other -- some that we're doing on that project, $8.2 million. And savings would be [indiscernible] of $3 million to $4 million a year from power loss. The Eastern Shore expansion, I just spoke about that. Somewhat you could see pretty much our map with the initial [indiscernible] that covers. So that's FERC's [indiscernible] Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The pre-filing processes underway. And so we're getting moving. And we also have all the precedent agreements so we could start putting together our filings for FERC to get approval for the Eastern Shore file. Real quickly, as I mentioned, $99 million capital investment, $15.7 million in the first full year of operation after the service. So that will be in service in the fourth quarter of '17, late in the fourth quarter. So most of the margin impact will be -- greater impact on the margin impact will be in ‘18 as opposed to '17. These performance quadrants are pretty important slide for us. Those weighted average ROE is on the vertical axis. The capital expenditure/total compensation is on the horizontal axis. And what we're looking at here is based [indiscernible]. I want to talk about the capital expenditures first in that horizontal axis. We can deploy a lot of capital, make a few investments, and we can do that right now. You can see in this peer bridge, there are only 2…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Spencer Joyce with Hilliard Lyons.

Just one really quick one for me here, and I actually had to hop off on to the South Jersey call. But I did want to ask about the Sandpiper rate case and the new rates going into effect in December. I know you mentioned revenue-neutral. I know Sandpiper, we've talked about kind of on the periphery for a few years now. And was -- is that revenue-neutral about what you expected? I know, Mike, you've mentioned that's kind of a long game there as we get those customers converted over the next few years. I'm just wondering how the ultimate outcome there kind of jive with your initial kind of hopes and expectations?

Actually, I just [indiscernible] it might sound strange, but it is very good outcome [indiscernible] make a very fair outcome, probably a little better than we expected. What you have here with the Sandpiper, as you know, it was a propane underground distribution system, unregulated [indiscernible] there. We knew we had a complex, I guess, series of investment we'll be placing in trying to convert that to natural gas. And if we were trying to convert that and had customers that are all going from unregulated to regulated as we were doing conversions, there was going to be a lot of friction, I guess, with the residents that were still on propane. And so we went and [indiscernible] costs, so that everybody was in the same boat. We could [indiscernible] conversion as quickly as possible. And so with that, it creates a complex mostly rate of return question. So we have propane customers, we have natural gas customers, what kind of rate of return do you use? And we have been achieving very high rates of return -- maybe very high rates of return, but very high rates of return. So we knew that, that was at risk. And so we felt like the balance that we can get [indiscernible] was a good -- pretty good place. So we're going to be continuing to convert customers, getting properly compensated for that with reasonably good -- the effect is to have reasonably good return.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions queued up on the phone. I turn the call back over to the presenters.

Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us here today and your interest in our company. We're going to continue to be dedicated to drive earnings in a manner that's responsible for the safety of the customers [indiscernible]. So thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.