Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Aaron. I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Atmos Energy Corporation Fiscal Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star followed by one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn our call over to Dan Meziere. Dan, please go ahead. Great. Thank you, Aaron. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our fiscal 2023 3rd quarter earnings call. With me today are Kevin Akers, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Forsythe, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings release and conference call slide presentation, which we will reference in our prepared remarks, are available at atmosenergy.com, under the Investor Relations tab. As we review these financial results and discuss future expectations, please keep in mind that some of our discussion might contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act. Our forward-looking statements and projections could differ materially from actual results. The factors that could cause such material differences are outlined on slide 34 and are more fully described in our SEC filings. With that. I will turn the call over to Chris Forsythe, our Senior Vice President, CFO. Chris? Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us and your interest in Atmos Energy. Yesterday, we announced fiscal year-to-date diluted earnings per share of $5.33, compared to $5.12 per diluted share in the prior year period. Our third quarter and fiscal year-to-date financial results were in line with our expectations and continue to be driven by three key themes: regulatory outcomes reflecting increased safety and reliability spending, continued strong customer growth, and higher O&M spending. Fiscal 2022 and 2023 regulatory outcomes in both of our segments increased operating income by approximately $204 million. Higher consumption, residential customer growth, and rising industrial load in our distribution segment increased operating income by an additional $27 million. These increases were partially offset by a $70 million increase in consolidated O&M. Year-to-date, distribution O&M increased $48 million or 12.6%. However, during the third fiscal quarter, the rate of O&M increase in this segment moderated somewhat, with O&M increasing approximately 3.5% quarter-over-quarter. The higher level of O&M spending continues to be largely driven by higher levels of service orders to support our growing service territory, primarily in Texas. Fiscal year-to-date, we experienced an 8% increase in the number of line locations in Texas, and we continue to see higher labor costs for these third-party services. Additionally, service orders increased 10%, largely driven by customer growth and increased customer collection activities. The remaining $22 million fiscal year-to-date increase in consolidated O&M incurred in our pipeline and storage segments, primarily driven by the timing of in-line inspection work for this segment. In the prior fiscal year, most of that work was concentrated in the fourth quarter. In this fiscal year, this work was incurred more regularly throughout the fiscal year. Consolidated capital spending increased 21% or $358 million to $2.1 billion, with 86% dedicated to improving the safety and reliability of our system. This increase primarily reflects higher spending at APT for our Line S2 and Line PC projects, designed to enhance the safety, reliability, versatility, and supply diversification of our system. Spending in our distribution segment has increased due to higher safety and reliability spending and higher spending to support customer growth. During our third fiscal quarter, we implemented $122 million in annualized regulatory outcomes. Year-to-date, we have now completed $263 million in annualized regulatory outcomes. We currently have an additional $263 million in annualized outcomes and progress, including $107 million related to our APT general rate case that we filed in May of this year. We currently expect to finalize that case in December of 2023. Our financial position continues to remain strong. We finished our third fiscal quarter with an equity capitalization of 61.8% and approximately $3.1 billion of liquidity. This amount includes $590 million in net proceeds available under existing forward sale agreements that will fully satisfy our anticipated fiscal 2023 equity needs and a significant portion of our anticipated fiscal 2024 needs. Additionally, during our third fiscal quarter, we completed our $95 million securitization process in Kansas and then began including the securitization charge on customer bills effective July 1st. As I previously mentioned, our third quarter and fiscal year-to-date results were in line with our expectations, which gives us the confidence to reaffirm our fiscal 2023 guidance in the range of $6.00-$6.10. Additionally, we now expect capital spending to approximate $2.8 billion, largely reflecting higher spending for system expansion in our distribution segment. Thank you for your time today, and I will turn the call over to Kevin for his update and some closing remarks. Kevin? Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our fiscal year performance reflects the continued dedication of our 4,800 Atmos Energy employees in executing our proven safety and reliability investment strategy. Through their commitment, focus, and effort, we are modernizing our natural gas distribution, transmission, and storage systems while safely providing reliable natural gas service to our 3.4 million customers in 1,400 communities across our eight states. We continue to experience strong customer growth, driven by robust employment trends, particularly in Texas. For the 12 months ended June 30th, we added nearly 64,000 new customers, with just over 48,000 of those new customers located here in Texas. According to the Texas Workforce Commission, the state continued its streak of record employment. For the 12 months ended May 31st, the number of employed reached a new record high at nearly 14.4 million, leading the country in number and% of jobs added. According to a study by Site Selection Group, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is projected to add 1 million people by 2028 to reach nearly 8.5 million people here in the Metroplex. Industrial demand for natural gas in our service territories also remains strong. During the 3rd quarter, we added 10 new industrial customers with an anticipated annual load of approximately 8 BCF once they are fully operational. Fiscal year to date, we've added 41 new industrial customers with an anticipated annual load of approximately 16 BCF once they are fully operational. On a volumetric basis, that 16 BCF of anticipated load is equivalent to adding nearly 294,000 residential customers. Finally, we continued our outreach efforts to energy assistance agencies and customers. During the first nine months of the fiscal year, our customer advocacy team and customer support agents helped over 55,000 customers receive about $23 million in funding assistance. Our continued focus on long-term sustainability, combined with executing our proven investment, regulatory, and financing strategy, has us positioned well for another successful year in fiscal 2023, and reflects the vital role we play in every community, providing safe, reliable, and efficient natural gas service to homes, businesses, and industries to fuel our energy needs now and in the future. We appreciate your time this morning, and we'll now open the call to questions. At this time, I would like to remind everyone that in order to ask a question, press star and then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Our first question is going to come from the line of Richard Sunderland with JP Morgan. Richard, please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, good morning. Yes, we can. Go ahead. Great, thank you. Starting with the O&M trends, can you speak to the year-to-date trends relative to the implied fourth Q outlook here? There's certainly a pretty stark reversal kind of embedded in the numbers. I know you referenced inspection work, but just curious if there are other timing factors at play. Also, if you've done work to de-risk 2024, and that's part of the, the outlook for the balance of the year as well. Thank you, Richard. We'll cover 23. Again, a lot of the timing is related to the APT and line inspection work that I referenced just a couple of minutes ago. again, more of that was, more of that work was ratable this year in the first half of the year, the fiscal year, primarily, compared to last year, it was more concentrated in the fourth quarter. As we look forward, into fiscal 2024, we're still pulling together that 5-year plan, but we are looking for opportunities to de-risk that a little bit in terms of particularly on the distribution side, you know, looking at how we might approach line locate, the strategy there, as well as just trying to lock in some longer-term contracts and some of our service contracts that are third party by design. Those are some things that we're looking at to try to mitigate some increases going forward. Got it. Very helpful color there. Shifting to the APT rate case, curious on the early thoughts on stakeholder engagement, what you're hearing locally? What is the timing for settlement discussions, just procedurally in that case, and any expectations around, you know, your ability to reach a settlement? Yeah, Richard, this is evin. I'll start out. We're right on pace with the procedural schedule as it's outlined there. We're still continuing to get data requests. We're responding to those. At this point, if you look at the procedural schedule, we feel like we're on track to get an order sometime toward the end of the calendar year in that December timeframe. Then just high-level thoughts on ability to reach a settlement here. Is that something that's, you know, embedded in the plan? Any, anything you can say on that front would be helpful. No, again, we're, we're still continuing to answer questions at this point. We'll see how we progress over the next few weeks or so. At this point, again, I think we're on track with the outlined procedural schedule. Great. I'll leave it there. Thank you for the time today. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, go ahead and press star and then one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for another moment to see if we have other questions. Our next question is from Ryan Levine with Citi. Ryan, please go ahead. Hi, everybody. Just a couple on O&M costs. A ppreciate the, the comments already made, but as on a go-forward basis, should we be expecting the seasonality of, of operating costs to be more like this year or, or prior years? And kind of what's driving some of the, the, the change in cadence? Yeah, Ryan, as you, you think about on a go forward, we certainly had anticipated going into 2023, some of the inflationary costs. We knew we were gonna have some growth, which, if you look at the O&M, was driven on a line locating, as Chris mentioned before. I would certainly anticipate that to continue. I think we've got a, a good outlook on that now on where we stand on number of locates, type of other O&M expenses, as Chris said, as we move to finalize our 2024 plan and look forward from there. Yeah. The other thing, too, Ryan, I'll add, is that, you know, a lot of this timing is just based upon the availability of the contractors to do the work. Kind of talked about a little bit with the APT work last year. We did a lot of work in the fourth quarter because the contractors were on, you know, on site. They were working with us. We decided to go ahead and move into the Q1 and Q2 since they were already engaged with us, rather than releasing them and have them come back six months later. We also have to just work around the needs of the system, you know, the timing of the system. It depends on what we might be doing on some construction work on certain segments of the system, which can influence the timing. I've also referenced service orders. A lot of those are difficult to forecast, you know, service orders generally related to, particularly this last year, you know, more calling into the customer contact center because of high bills, given the higher prices we experienced, back in the winter heating season. Difficult to predict if that will reoccur in the Q1 and Q2 as well as just some of our disconnection activities. that's why we, we manage to a full fiscal year in terms of guidance, you know, because, some of those, operating conditions are difficult to predict. We're just responding, to the needs of business with an eye towards, accomplishing our fiscal year, earnings per share targets. I think that's the other point, Ryan, here is as our communities, as you've heard us say, are growing and expanding out, where we're working with them on timing of their projects, whether they're infrastructure projects or occurring water, sewer, you've got fiber optic projects out there, you've got road relocations, new road construction, that sort of thing going on. Some of this does cycle throughout the full fiscal year period. How much is this change in seasonality of costs that was embedded in that response is really related to the spike in gas prices during this most recent winter, as opposed to some of the other drivers that you highlighted? I don't know that I would make that kind of direct correlation. I think what Chris was alluding to is some orders for re-read, that sort of thing, based on bills, but I don't think it's, it's a, a meaningful percentage of the rest of the overall operational O&M per se. Okay. Then, one, I noticed in your, with your g uidance for the year, you know, you're approaching year-end, clearly your fiscal year-end, and the effective tax rate this year is supposed to be higher than last year. Is that, from a longer-term planning perspective, are you anticipating that the current effective tax rate is appropriate for, for future time periods? Or any color you could share around how you're thinking about your tax position. Yeah, Ryan, the effective tax rate that you see is roughly 11%. That's heavily influenced by the refund of excess deferred tax liabilities from the TCJA. We're amortizing those over a 3-5 year period, so that's why we've included in our, in our deck, you know, kind of the marginal effective tax rate of roughly 22.5%-23.5%, so that you have an idea of really what true tax impacts are if you're, if you're modeling your O&M or, or other types of expenses or revenues. We do anticipate the GAAP effective tax rate to increase as the excess deferred taxes wind down here over the next couple of years and revert back to that more traditional 22%-23.5%. Okay, great. Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, press star, followed by the number 1 on your keypad telephone. We'll pause for just another moment to see if we have other questions come in. At this point, it does look like we are good on the questions. Dan, would you like me to turn it back over to you for closing remarks? Sure. We appreciate your interest in Atmos Energy, and thank you for joining us. A recording of this call is available for replay on our website through September thirtieth. Have a great day. Thanks. Thank you, Dan. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.