Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the MYR Group's Third Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Philip Kranz of Dresner. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the MYR Group conference call to discuss the Company's third quarter results for 2012, which were reported yesterday. Joining us on today's call are Bill Koertner, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Paul Evans, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. If you did not receive yesterday's press release, please contact Dresner Corporate Services at (312) 726-3600, and we will send you a copy or go to www.myrgroup.com where a copy is available under the Investor Relations tab. Also, a replay of today's call will be available through Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time by dialing (855) 859-2056 or (404) 537-3406 and entering conference ID 53856841. Before we begin, I want to remind you this discussion may contain forward-looking statements. Any such statements are based upon information available to MYR management as of this date, and MYR assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those -- from the forward-looking statements. Accordingly, these statements are no guarantee of future performance. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in the company's 10-K -- Form 10-K for the year-ended December 31, 2011, the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2012 and in yesterday's press release. Certain non-GAAP financial information will be discussed on the call today. A reconciliation of this non-GAAP information to the most comparable GAAP measure is set forth in yesterday's press release, which can be found on our website. With that said, let me turn the call over to Bill Koertner.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2012 conference call to discuss financial and operational results. I'll provide a brief summary of third quarter results before turning the call over to Paul Evans, our CFO, for a more detailed financial review. Following Paul's discussion, I will provide some additional information and an outlook for our industry. We are very pleased with our financial performance for the third quarter of 2012, which included significant increases in revenue, gross margin, EBITDA and earnings per share as compared to the same quarter last year. Revenues increased to $250.6 million in the third quarter of 2012 from $210.5 million in the third quarter of 2011. This represents an increase of 19% with all of this growth being achieved organically. Gross margin for the third quarter of 2012 increased to 11.8% compared to 9.4% over the third quarter of 2011, an increase of 240 basis points, which was primarily attributable to improved execution of our work and higher utilization of our fleet assets. Diluted earnings per share were $0.41 for the third quarter of 2012 compared to $0.20 for the same quarter of last year. This represents a growth of 105%. Our results for the first 9 months of 2012 are up substantially as compared to the same period last year, and we believe that we are on pace for an outstanding year, as we continue to benefit from the investments we've made over the last several years in workforce development, equipment and tooling. In addition to measuring our performance based upon revenues, margins and earnings, we evaluate several other fundamental performance measures both on a period-to-period internal comparison with ourselves as well as against our peers. We monitor such measures as growth in book value and tangible book value per share, EBITDA per…

Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday after the market closed, we announced our 2012 third quarter results. As Bill mentioned, our revenues for the third quarter of 2012 were $250.6 million, which represented a $40.1 million increase over the same period in 2011. On a percentage basis, 2012 third quarter revenues increased 19% over the 2011 third quarter. From a segment standpoint and compared to the 2011 third quarter, T&D revenues increased $33.4 million to $204.3 million, and C&I revenues increased $6.7 million to $46.3 million. Focusing on the T&D segment, revenues were $170.5 million for transmission and $33.8 million for distribution in the third quarter of 2012. This compares to $127.1 million for transmission and $43.7 million for distribution for the third quarter of 2011. The third quarter 2012 increase in transmission revenues primarily related to a number of large transmission awards in late 2010 and early 2011 that were in various stages of their respective construction cycles during the quarter. The underlying contract costs on those projects included a greater-than-normal amount of subcontractor material costs. I'm frequently asked about the impact that subcontractors and material have on our revenue and costs, so I wanted to provide more information about this question today. Subcontractor and material costs can normally constitute 30% to 45% of the overall contract costs. With large transmission projects currently under construction, those costs are running at the upper end of that range. When our transmission projects include subcontractor costs, we normally expect to incur those costs in the early and mid-stages of the project's construction, when our subcontracts are clearing rights of way, building roads and digging foundations. Our utility customers typically furnish major materials such as the structures, conductor, insulators and other hardware for transmission projects. We do have a couple of…

Thanks, Paul. While our construction management teams continue to focus on the execution of projects in various stages of construction, our estimating teams have been hard at work evaluating and pricing projects throughout the country. As noted earlier, we see ample opportunity for continued growth in transmission construction for projects of all sizes throughout the U.S., including new lines, upgrades and associated substation work. Our large projects group and our regional district offices have been busy responding to RFIs and RFPs for discrete projects, as well as alliance-type arrangements, also known as MSAs. These consist of multiple projects over a longer specified period of time. As noted earlier, we monitor a variety of information sources on transmission spending projections. They all point to a very bright future in both the near and long term for reliable, well-capitalized service providers like MYR. For market analysis and planning purposes, we'd like to break the overall transmission market down by transmission planning regions. This commonality among all regions is that they -- that relatively little money has been spent on new transmission and system upgrades over the last 20 to 30 years. Concerns over reliability, along with implementation of mandatory reliability standards, are driving transmission investment for the repair and replacement of aging infrastructure across the country. In addition, more transmission infrastructure should be needed to interconnect renewable power sources to load centers, and new transmission and upgrade needs should also increase as a result of the retirement and conversion of older coal-fired and oil generation plants to cleaner sources of energy. Furthermore, we anticipate that the eventual implementation of FERC Order 1000 will encourage merchant transmission investments to facilitate the movement in new transmission development across the country and contribute to a robust transmission market for years to come. A number of…

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Dan Mannes with Avondale.

So first question on storm, I wanted to ask first on Q3. I know some of your peers, picked up a pretty nice chunk of storm work in the third quarter, particularly in the East region on the Derecho [ph]. It looked like you actually saw some annual decline -- some year-over-year declines. I was wondering just was it due to the duration of the storm or location that maybe you didn't participate in that one. Just if you can give some color there.

Well, you're right about the numbers. We did not benefit as much as some of our competitors. I think it's mostly location, so it really isn't anything more than that. The storms that occurred in the third quarter were not quite as widespread to require a national effort to bring in resources from far away to address the storm need. So it's pretty much a location issue, Dan.

Okay. And then the follow-up is on storm, so for the fourth quarter, it sounded like, number one, it's fair to assume that your storm work should be up sequentially at least given the number of people mobilized. And two, as they are being released on existing projects, then while it may not be a net increase in revenue, that should theoretically, I guess, push some of the existing backlog, I guess, into '13 and beyond. Is that the right way to think about it?

I think that's the right way to think about it. There should be a net increase in revenue. Obviously, if we're pulling people off of existing projects, we will not be recognizing the revenue on those projects, but we're moving people to the storm area. And as you can imagine, they're working many, many hours, so we and our competitors are billing for a lot of man hours, and we're billing for a lot of equipment so long as the restoration efforts are ongoing.

Okay. And then a quick transition to the bidding environment, there have been a couple of fairly large bids that have been announced, and some of them actually gone to maybe some competitors we -- that we hadn't been seeing being as successful. Have you seen any change maybe in the bidding environment from a pricing perspective? Or was it more just location, terms, et cetera?

Well, there are some new players that have come in the market, and they've come in aggressively looking to build business. That's -- business is -- even though there's a lot of work out there, where there's money to be made, you got people trying to get into the business. So there are some new players that are entering the market and maybe entering regions that they have historically not competed in. That's probably more on point, but there still is plenty of work out there for the MYR with our long-standing core customers. So we feel really good about the opportunity for the next several years on the transmission front.

Sure. And then one final one, just closing out the loop on that topic and then, I'll jump back in queue. You mentioned bidding opportunities Midwest, Great Plains and then later on in the West. When you talk about the Midwest and Great Plains, are you talking current bidding? Or are you being a little bit more forward-looking into next year?

Both. We see a number of good-sized project, maybe not necessarily ones that would rise up to the standard where we would put out a news release, but definitely, we see some near-term projects that are being bid. Some of which are under more kind of alliance-type arrangements, where it's not totally open to the world for competition. So we're seeing some near-term projects, and we're really very optimistic about the long term.

Would you consider PR-ing $50 million to $100 million awards in the future? Just given your size, that actually does move the needle?

Yes, yes. If we got award in the $50 million to $100 million, we would put out some kind of announcement.

Our next question comes from Tahira Afzal with KeyBanc.

Just wanted to ask you, the first question is really in regards to your C&I business. I know it gets less attention accorded to it, but I'm assuming you've seen some trends changing and so has some of your peers. And so just wanted to get a sense. Do you think these are sustainable changes as we look out to next year? And also with all the storms that have been coming, the utility commentary has suggested that maybe there are some notable changes that need to come out on electric distribution spending, which seem like they could be sustainably beneficial. So any commentary on those 2 things to begin with would be helpful.

Sure. First let me focus on the C&I business. What's driven our C&I business recently and it's been a long-term driver, but we've really seen maybe some upticks here, would be on airport work, data centers. Our traffic group, which we roll up under our C&I group has been strong, and we've also seen some work in the Arizona market on mining as well as all of the intel work that's taken place in Arizona. So those would be kind of the underlying drivers of strength in our C&I market. On the electric distribution side, I guess I see it as 2 issues. One is what is going to be the near-term impact of all the storm restorations that will, I think, benefit MYR and several other contractors. And as I know the analysts will quickly quantify that and then factor it out as a onetime event, so that's one issue, but I do think it is going to be fairly significant for a number of contractors. The second maybe more powerful driver and we saw this a little bit last year with Irene, as those of you who live on the East Coast know some of the East Coast utilities got beat up pretty bad and accused of lack of preparedness, lack of tree trimming, lack of a lot of things, and that affected relatively few distribution utilities. This storm that we're trying to restore today is much broader. Many more utilities are involved, with their systems down, with their systems having outages for over a week. So I do expect some kind of political backlash to that. Not sure it's fair because I do think our -- the utility customers do a very good job of preparing for storms, but politicians being what they are, I think there will likely be some political backlash, and that could result in some feeder upgrading kind of work that would benefit a contractor like MYR.

Got it. Okay, Bill. And I guess the second question is sort of a follow-on to this commentary of yours. As you look out, you've clearly are doing a good job on execution on the large transmission project. As these projects get executed next year, you should see a nice amount of accounts receivable come and use your cash. So as you look out to next year, would you talk a little more about potential acquisitions in terms of timing, in terms of direction given that there seem to be a couple of nice, interesting markets developing upfront?

So first on the cash side, obviously, the big projects all have retention provisions. Kind of the typical retention provision is 10%. We've been successful on some to cap that at lesser amounts and -- but the typical retention is 10%. So if you got a, let's say, $100 million contract that equates to at the end of the project, you get $9 million or $10 million tied up in the receivable on that project. So as these projects wrap up, we would expect to put that retention in our pocket. Your question about acquisitions, as you know, we've not been a particularly acquisitive company. That doesn't mean we don't look at things. We are constantly evaluating different opportunities, both within kind of our direct markets of transmission and distribution, but we've also looked at some things that would be a little bit further afield, it wouldn't be getting into something crazy like health care or computer stores or something. But we have looked at some acquisitions that would be a little bit outside of our core work. So we haven't pulled the trigger on anything. I wouldn't suggest that anything is eminent, but we do look at that. And as you know, looking at our financial statements, we have not had very much exposure to purchase accounting. Companies who are very acquisitive have a lot of purchase accounting decisions to make as how they attribute purchase prices to the various assets, what kind of liability accruals they set up and more importantly, how much goodwill they put on their books. And as you know, we have very little goodwill on our books compared to some of the peer companies that you compare us to. So that's probably a more complete answer than you wanted.

Our next question comes from Andrew Wittmann with Robert W. Baird & Co.

So wanted to just kind of touch on one comment that you made in your remarks, Bill. You mentioned that MSA was maybe a little bit softer there. Just curious, is that -- did you lose an MSA? Or are people doing more in-sourcing? Or is there just less work out there today?

If I said there was a reduction in MSA, I misspoke. I don't remember saying that, but we have not lost any MSA agreements. Actually, there are probably more MSA-type agreements that we're doing transmission work under today than ever before, in the past, MSA has been pretty much focused on distribution spending. But there are a number of MSAs that we're working under today on this NERC reliability work. So if I said our MSA was down, I misspoke.

Okay. Sorry, I think it was more applicable to the distribution side. Maybe I did hear it wrong, so I apologize for that. I also wanted to dig a little bit into the SG&A levels in the quarter. You got 10 basis points of year-over-year expansion, but revenues were up significantly more than -- it was up a significant amount. I'm just kind of curious as to your thoughts as to the opportunity on the SG&A side, recognizing that you did mention that you are making some adjustments to your cost structure. Just kind of wanted to see how that all goes together and what your expectations for leverage at the corporate level are.

I'm going to let Paul answer that. He dissects our SG&A every month, and it is something that we are working very hard at keeping down, so we can leverage our SG&A for the benefit of shareholders. But Paul, you have any more color you want to share there?

Yes. Andy, what I'd say is just as with the last quarter, our SG&A was just at the right levels for the amount of business we had. I told people that I think we can leverage our SG&A further. I think our headcount numbers are at the levels they need to be. The dollars with them are at the right level. I mean this SG&A as a percentage of revenue can fluctuate quarter-to-quarter depending on what our top line is. But I think we're really at a good place where our SG&A is. I mean, it is true. It's up year-over-year, but I would think for most companies, if they got an expanding headcount as we do, they would see a similar type sort of thing happen also.

So as we look at our models on a kind of go-forward basis, don't expect the same kind of increases. Should we assume that we're pretty close to a run rate for at least this revenue level or a little bit higher?

That would be the assumption I would use.

Okay. And then, Bill, just quickly, any large projects that are out there that are maybe ahead of schedule or maybe running a little bit behind schedule? The one that clearly sticks out is the status update on the One Nevada Line, but any others would be appreciated as well.

I don't really have any knowledge of things being sped up or slowed down. Rarely do transmission projects get sped up. In our case, on the Nevada One Line that we're working on, I think you know that, that project was shut down because of some engineering problems with the towers. The 2 owners, NV Energy and LS Power, have a solution to that. They're talking to their regulators about that. We're very optimistic that, that project will start back up in earnest at the first of the year. And we have throughout 2012, not stopped on that project. Now all of the roads are in. All of the foundations are in. All of the anchors are in for these structures. I think there may be just a little bit of work on a few lattice towers, so basically, what's left is putting the towers in the air and also doing the welding on the engineering fix that is being proposed on these towers. So first, weld the fix on the towers, erect the towers and do the wire work. The rest of the work continued on the original schedule, so we are optimistic that the structure setting and the wire work will start back up around the first of the year.

Our next question comes from William Bremer with the Maxim Group.

Paul, if I missed this, I apologize. Can you give us the breakdown of the transmission revenue and distribution revenue in this quarter versus last year?

Yes, bear with me 1 second. Revenues for transmission for the quarter were $170.5 million and for distribution was $33.8 million.

Okay. All right. And then, Bill, can you give us a little color on the current pricing environment now as we're seeing some projects getting potentially awarded going forward? Is it -- can we feel though that pricing is getting better, say, versus 6 months ago, a year ago at this point? Is capacity getting taken out?

In some regions, that would be true. I don't think it would be true to make that generalized statement. Pricing remains very competitive including on some of these big jobs that have been awarded recently. So -- but it's very much a region by region just like we compete for labor, region by region. There are some markets where labor is in very short supply. Other markets, labor is very available. Although as you would expect with the storms that have occurred for the last couple of weeks, labor has been acutely short all over, but that would be a temporary phenomenon. I imagine the next couple of weeks, these guys that have chased the storms will be back to their home areas in their home projects.

Given the size of this storm and the magnitude, is it potentially -- could have an effect in your, say, your March quarter as well?

Very likely not. I don't expect the restoration work to spill over into the first quarter, but with these storms, there's typically a lot of what I call kind of change orders that need to be resolved. And as we close the books for the fourth quarter, we'll be making an assessment of what meets our definition for revenue recognition, and if there are unresolved billings with clients, we will be making our best guess at that point in time. But if something is unresolved, I would expect it will get resolved in the first quarter, and that could lead to some revenue and margin recognition in the first quarter. Now one other part, and I alluded to Tahira earlier, what's happening now, where we're trying to get people's lights back on, there -- some of these fixes that we're putting in place are more temporary fixes, so I would expect more permanent fixes on some of these circuits. And when they get the engineering done and they got the material order, that should provide some benefit in '13, well beyond the first quarter. But specifically, I would think trying to resolve some of these billing issues on storm work, that has the potential of a first quarter carryover.

Okay. Good color, Bill. And one follow-up for you, Paul, a little housekeeping, on the corporate expense line, pretty significant year-over-year increase, even sequentially. Was there any onetime items there that I possibly missed?

No, I don't think so. And again, I offer this color to you. If you look at the growth in our revenues relative to the growth in our SG&A, I mean clearly, we -- year-to-year, we've leveraged SG&A quite well. So I think we're probably at a good steady-state level now.

Our next question comes from John Rogers with D.A. Davidson.

A couple of questions. First of all, maybe I just don't understand this, but in terms of the margins, Paul and Bill, you talked about pricing being flattish, increased level of usage of subs as a portion of the business. Yet, the gross margins keep going up. Is that just execution? Or could you just explain that a little bit?

It's really all of the above, including some pretty good execution. As you know, when we estimate a job and let's say it's 1/3 labor and equipment and 1/3 subcontractors and 1/3 material, which would be a rare job. We typically would not have that much material or subcontractors. So we might build the estimate by marking up the material a different markup than company labor and equipment, same way with subcontractor costs. At the end of the day, when we've got the estimate put together and if that overall weighted margin is 10% or 12% or whatever, that would be how we would recognize margin going forward until we became aware of knowledge that would say we needed to write it down or write it up. So that's pretty much how we approach it.

Okay and in terms of the addition -- the -- your capital spending and your additional property and equipment, is that a decent proxy for how much capacity you're adding?

Yes. I think it's a decent proxy, and we have definitely added many, many wire setups in the last 4 or 5 years, and our wire equipment, including the pulling equipment and tensioners and the tall buckets and the tall cranes, we own a lot of that and are continuing to buy some of it. And we don't have a lot of equipment sitting today, so I think it would be a good reflection. We're definitely not out trying to buy iron to go sit it on the back lot in hopes of finding work. We're trying to be smart about predicting the level of work going forward, and ultimately, it's important that we keep finding a home for all of that iron to keep it utilized.

Okay. Because I'm just trying to compare that to, I mean, the runoff of backlog, and I know when you've talked about how you look at backlog and things, but obviously, I mean, it's indication that, I mean, you see opportunities to put this equipment to work.

Yes. And we've, the same, responded to another question. There is a fairly significant amount of kind of quasi-negotiated work where there may be a tremendous volume of work in a region of the country, but it's being handed out in work orders. Some of which would be truly competitive bid. Some of which would be a more negotiated kind of work. We're definitely seeing more of that negotiated or limited competition kind of bidding than maybe what would have been the case historically.

Okay. And just lastly, I know you said you'll give us a better indication at the end of the fourth quarter, but mobilizing for 8 utilities in 11 states in response to Sandy, can you put that in perspective to other storms or events that you've seen in the past?

John, I've been at MYR for 13 years, and I've not seen anything like it. So I think it would be fair to say it would be greater than heavy storm activity of 2006, 2008 and not only for MYR but others, too. So it is a very widespread storm as evidenced. We're now, what, 10 days away from it and there's 600,000 customers still without service. So I think it's more significant than what I've seen in my 13 years at MYR.

Our next question comes from Craig Irwin with Wedbush Securities.

Most of my questions have been asked already, but I guess I can maybe take the line on backlog, see if we could dig in a little bit there. So in your presentations, you show 2 incremental areas on the CapX2020 project where you have crews mobilized. Can you confirm for us whether or not these incremental sections are already included in backlog, whether or not there was any addition to backlog relevant to CapX2020 in the quarter? And then you did talk about the SWIP project earlier in the call, but can you update us as far whether or not there was any incremental backlog added there? Or if that's something we can expect in the first quarter or if that would be added later on next year?

Craig, I'm going to respond to your -- the second part of your question, and I think Paul can verify the facts on the CapX work. The SWIP project, we've submitted pricing to the 2 utility owners. They're evaluating that. We do not have a contract on it, so that would not be in our backlog at this point. So assuming the regulators approve going forward with the engineering fix and assume we ink a contract for the change order, I would think that would be a backlog addition in the first quarter. Paul, you want to?

Sure. Craig, thanks for referring to our presentation. With respect to the piece in Fargo, that's not in backlog, but the piece in the Brooking's line, that is in backlog in the sections that are in red.

Excellent. Then, just as a follow-up, I don't know if you can share this with us given that your negotiations will be ongoing. But can you give us some rough estimation of size of incremental scope that you could execute on for SWIP?

I can't quantify it for you. It will be a significant dollar value because a lot of what is occurring there has to be redone. I'll use one example. That job has got millions of dollars of water to sprinkle on the desert to suppress the dust. When we bid that job initially, we expected to go in, do all of the work and get in and get out and run water trucks during the -- for the sections that we were working on. A lot of that environmental work -- and I used water because I think everybody can relate to that -- virtually, all of that has to be duplicated because now we need to go back to the beginning of the line, change out structures and basically traverse the whole line, so that would be incremental costs. But in terms of quantifying what that means, as well as other cost increases, I can't help you.

Would we be wrong to say something like tens of millions? Is that something that's too high?

I don't think you'd be wrong.

Our next question comes from Noelle Dilts with Stifel, Nicolaus.

First, I'd just like to get a little bit more granularity on your transmission revenues in the quarter. It looks like small to medium project activity declined at least sequentially. First of all, can you confirm that, if that's true and then talk about maybe if you think there's a reason why that's occurring?

I'll let Paul -- he's got a couple of background things to verify it one way or the other. And see if he can key out any color.

Noelle, I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if I can go down into that sort of granularity. I don't know that's the case.

Okay. So what -- I mean we've been seeing generally small to medium projects kind of keeping pace with growth year-over-year with the large projects. Was that true again in the quarter?

Well, I mean, you did see -- if you sort of focus in on book to bill, you did see an uptick in book to bill from Q2 to Q3. So I think that's attributable to the type of work that we're doing. I mean we are doing some large projects, but there is a lot of small- to medium-sized work that's going on, and some of that work, as Bill said, is not really bid out. It's work that's negotiated or handed off to us.

Okay. Second -- given some of the discussions we've had on the subcontract -- the piece of the transmission projects that you're subcontracting, can you just give me some thoughts on if this is the -- where you want to be in terms of the level of work that you're outsourcing, that you're subcontracting out or if you're thinking about bringing more of this business in-house and what pieces of that type of work would be attractive to bring in-house?

Well, as we look at both internally growing our capabilities as well as acquisitions, we're looking at vertical integration. We've already performed a lot of foundation work ourselves. We have the ability to expand that. We have the ability if we wanted to, to acquire businesses that specialize in that area. That would be something we'd look at. Some of the environmental work, putting in matting and so forth, we do some of it ourselves, but we could definitely expand it. So right up and down the food chain of what it takes to build a transmission job from road building to environmental work to foundations, there are potential expansion opportunities that we could internally expand or we could expand through an acquisition.

Our next question comes from Min Cho with FBR Capital Markets.

You actually answered my acquisition question just now, but curious if you're looking at any acquisitions in the C&I business.

We have looked at some, but that probably is not as high a priority as other things we might consider.

Okay. And it sounds like the acquisitions you're definitely looking to vertically integrate more, but what about geographically? Are you looking at anything in Canada? It sounds like there's a big opportunity there.

We are looking at geographic as well as vertical kind of integration or acquisitions.

Okay. And then just want to reconcile some of your commentary on distribution work. I thought I heard you say that year-to-date, you've seen increased bidding activity in electrical distribution markets, but you also talked about the kind -- the MSA work on the distribution side being down. You're seeing a lot of competition. Can you just clarify what you're seeing in the distribution market? I assume that's mostly MSA excluding the Sandy work right now.

On the distribution side, there have been some alliances that have been bid, that would have distribution substation and transmission work in them. Our distribution work, well, several years ago, we were actually picking up market share. This business is very, very competitive. We have not chosen to go quite as low as maybe some of our competitors to gain new distribution alliance kind of contracts. So that would probably be the reason that you saw a little dip in our distribution work.

Okay. And then my last question has to do with a prior question. I know that the storm work obviously displaces existing work, but are you actually pulling people from your transmission projects? Or is it purely on the distribution side?

No, we pulled some people off of our transmission projects we're -- and we've even been forced to put some transmission equipment to use on distribution projects. The call for resources is quite great, and even though a tall bucket might not be the most ideal piece of equipment for a piece of distribution work, when you got this many people without electricity, there are situations where we've used some transmission equipment to assist in that. Certainly, there are many things like crew cabs, pick-up trucks and crawler tractors and equipment to transport equipment would be interchangeable between the 2, but we actually have some linemen who are capable of doing both transmission and distribution work and substation work. We have pulled some of them off as transmission projects provided it was acceptable with our client and have them working on Sandy. And as you know, these are not -- our employees are not indentured servants to us. Some cases, they're going to go to the storm whether they go with us or jump in some other contractor truck. So we need to really be smart to hold the people for the critical transmission projects that have critical outages. And I think we're doing a very good job of balancing, not only taking care of existing transmission projects that are under construction, plus providing resources for the storm.

[Operator Instructions] We do have a follow-up question from Andrew Wittmann with Robert W. Baird & Co.

I wanted to just touch base on the buyback a little bit. Paul, obviously, not active in the quarter, and I do know it's a partial quarter. But just curious as to your thoughts, was there a thought that maybe there's a near-term working capital? I mean I know that always has kind of first dollar priority or were you blocked out during the quarter. Anything that may have really kind of prevented you or somehow, I guess prevented you from being involved in the stock?

None, not at all. I mean it's a function of the grid that we have established to repurchase shares, and obviously, that didn't occur in this quarter. But there was no liquidity reason why we couldn't do it or no statutory reason why we couldn't do it.

We do have a follow-up question from John Rogers with D.A. Davidson.

I just wanted to go back to one thing. Bill, you talked about some of the projects, the larger projects that you're negotiating on now. Can you give us a sense of the timeline on when we might start to hear about this stuff? Is it spread all the way out through 2013? Or is it...

John, when I said projects that we might be negotiating, they wouldn't be the larger press release kind of projects. They would be small or midsized jobs that would flow in and out of our backlog, and you'd never read about them because we wouldn't -- it wouldn't rise to the level of requiring disclosure on our part. So there aren't -- I'm not aware of any big, big projects out there that are being negotiated with us or anybody else. All the big projects, they're very broad sourcings that take place.

Okay. And the extensions of work that you're doing, like CapX2020 and some of those, those will just come in as pieces, hopefully, in 2013?

Yes, and there's no guarantee that we're going to get the extensions. A lot of that is performance driven. If we perform very well, I think the chances of picking up additional segments are very good. If our performance is not up to the expectation of the client, there could be some more competitive bidding take place.

Okay. And I know that -- I mean you'd -- you've got your conservative approach on backlog, but I mean, just how low can this backlog go before you start to really worry about visibility? Because it seems like you're running the business for growth, and yet, we keep seeing these orders come down.

We really don't have any answer to that. We obviously need work. We got all of our men and virtually -- most of our equipment employed today, but as these projects wrap up in 2013, we do need a home for our people and a home for the equipment. So we are aggressively canvassing the markets in both established regions where we've historically done a lot of work, as well as maybe some new regions. So it's a constant balancing act. You always need new work to keep going in.

At this time, I'm showing no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Bill Koertner for closing remarks.

Well, I'd like to again thank everybody for participating in our call. We remain pretty excited about the opportunities for our business, not just on the transmission side, but we feel good about the C&I and the distribution side of our business. So I don't have anything more, and I look forward to talking to you after we close the fourth quarter.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Have a wonderful day.