John D'Orazio
Management
Good morning everyone. Welcome to RGC Resources Second Quarter Earnings Call. I'm John D'Orazio, President and CEO of RGC Resources. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to attend. Please mute your question and hold your questions until the completion of the presentation. Also the link to today's presentation is available on our website at rgcresources.com on the Investor and Financial Information page. Before we begin, just a reminder on forward-looking statements as shown on Slide 2. Moving on to Slide 3, we plan to review key operational and financial highlights, our outlook for 2018, and take any questions. Our second quarter earnings per share are $0.47, and as shown on Slide 4, fiscal year-to-date earnings per share are $0.76 which includes a one-time non-cash charge of $208,000 related to tax reform. Excluding the one-time charge, year-to-date earnings per share would have been $0.78 which is a $0.02 per share ahead of 2017. We will cover more second quarter and year-to-date financial results later in the presentation. We have successfully completed a $16 million public offering in mid-March. The proceeds from the equity rise will primarily be used to support one of our key growth strategies which is continued investment in a regulated utility which allows us to grow rate-based earnings. As Slide 5 highlights, we invested $5 million in a regulated utility in the second quarter, a $2 million decrease over the same period last year. Approximately $2.4 million was spent on infrastructure replacement, $1.3 million on customer growth, and $1.3 million on other capital needs. The quarter-to-quarter decline was primarily due to elevated spending in the 2017 second quarter attributed to our automated meter reading or AMR projects. Slide 6, shows year-to-date capital spending. Again we are slightly behind 2017 due to the AMR project.…