California Water Service Group (NYSE:CWT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Keahou in Hawaii, which is a wastewater management system that adds 1500 equivalent units or basically 1500 customers to our wastewater base in Hawaii, that adds 24% of the connection base for our Hawaii operations. Up in the Pacific Northwest in Washington, we added Stroh’s water and Bethel Green Acres, they were approved by the WUTC in January of this year, that’ll add 3% to the customer base for our connections in the state of Washington. And if you go down to the very bottom of the page, Lake section, New Mexico, we announced in January of 2023, definitive agreement and that has been filed with the New Mexico Public Service Commission that’ll add 5000 connections or 58%, to our connection base in New Mexico. So we’ve continued to have good luck on the business development side and growing our business outside of the state of California.

And we’ll look forward to updating you on these business development endeavors as we move forward in 2023. Back to you Tom?

Tom Smegal: So I’ll just do a quick update on our capital investment and read the slides on Slide 18. We’ve shown the capital investment for 2022. We continue to achieve CapEx that is 3x our depreciation rate. That’s now a total of seven years where we’ve been doing the best case, CapEx. And you’ll see that remember, 2023, 2024 are dependent upon the CPUC decision and direction that we get from the CPUC in California with respect to the 2021 general rate case. There have been no changes to Slide 19. Again, that’s our estimated regulated rate base, particularly as it relates to California. We’re awaiting a ruling as we talked about that would determine what the regulated rate basis in 2023 as well as ’24 and ’25. So Marty, I will turn this back to you.

Marty Kropelnicki: Great. And on Page 24, we are going to wrap up and what’s going to happen during 2023, looking forward. First and foremost, as we talked about on this call, not a lot of new news on the cost of capital in the general rate case, we are waiting, as our most of the water utilities in the state of California that are regulated by the PUC that will create some short-term regulatory uncertainty as we wait for the two key decisions. We continue to work with the Commission, and we’ll do everything we can to get those decisions out as quickly as possible, but ultimately the ball is in their court. Likewise, as we go into the end of the first quarter, it means the financial reporting is going to be a little bit more challenging because we are officially decoupled from decoupling, but you don’t have a rate order that as all your mechanisms laid out yet, as Greg mentioned.

So like we’ve done in previous year GRC is, where we have anticipated mechanisms and trackers that we think we’ll be using when ultimately approve, we will provide as much information on both sides of the fence so to speak. So you can see what the numbers are kind of pre and post based on what we think those trackers are going to be. So if we can just ask everyone to bear with us till we get through the two decisions, once the decisions that’ll clear a lot of it out, but it will be a little choppy making sense of all this in the interim, while we are no longer decoupled and waiting for a GRC decision that ultimately approval attractors as well as cap structure, cost to capital, et cetera. We’ll stay focused on regulation. Clearly, we’re going to continue making progress in business development, the business development team has been very busy.