Goodday, and welcome to the Essential Utilities Inc. Q3 2021 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Brian Dingerdissen. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Lauren. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Essential Utilities' third quarter earnings call. I'm Brian Dingerdissen, Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. If you did not receive a copy of the press release, you can find it by visiting the investor relations section of our website at essential.co. The slides that we will be referencing and the webcast of this event can also be found on our website. As a reminder, some of the matters discussed during this call may include forward-looking statements that involve risk, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Please refer to our most recent 10-Q, 10-K, and other SEC filings for a description of such risks and uncertainties. During the course of this call, reference may be made to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures is included at the end of the presentation and also posted in the investor relations section of the company's website. Here's our agenda for the call today. We'll start with Chris Franklin, our Chairman and CEO, who will discuss the third quarter highlights and provide a company update. Next, Dan Schuler, our CFO, will discuss our financial results. Chris will then provide an update on our growth strategy, the municipal water and wastewater acquisition program, and conclude the presentation portion before opening the call for questions. With that, I will turn the call over to Chris Franklin. Hey, thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me start the call today with a thank you. Thank you to many of you who took the time to participate in our recent investor perception study. You know, we conduct that survey about every other year, and it helps provide us with another perspective, an overall perspective, if you will, from investors, which then supplements what we hear from all of you in our what amounts to about 300 plus meetings with investors throughout each year. We really appreciate the strong confidence that you expressed in management in the work we're doing in that survey and especially around municipal acquisitions. I do wanna bring clarity, though, to one issue where there seemed to be some ambiguity in the minds of at least a few investors about how we think about our work in natural gas. First, you know, we're really proud of the work and the results our natural gas team is achieving. Our careful study of the market indicates that natural gas, especially in our key service area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be an important part of the energy mix for probably decades to come. In less than 15 years, we will be at least 60% of the way toward our aspirational goal of net zero emissions. Listen, we acknowledge the fact that natural gas utilities are currently achieving sub-optimal trading multiples in the public markets, and this despite the very high private market multiples achieved in recent natural gas company transactions. With these things in mind, I wanna be really crystal clear. Growth through acquisition in natural gas is not in our strategy. Our strategy in natural gas is to replace the nearly 3,000 miles of gas main to improve safety, reliability, and the environment while generating the associated earnings per share. Let me go one step further. Our strategy is keenly focused on growing our water business through acquisition, and we have a very successful track record in doing this already. Hopefully, you'll agree. I hope this clears any ambiguity that existed in the market around our growth strategy. All right. With that, let's take a quick look at the third quarter highlights. The water and gas teams have been focused and working hard on infrastructure improvements. We are on pace to replace about 180 miles of water main this year and about 175 miles of gas main this year. On a combined basis, that's water and natural gas, we've invested about $676 million in infrastructure improvements throughout our systems in just the first nine months of this year as compared to about $608 million for the same period last year. We remain on track to spend about $1 billion in capital on infrastructure this year. Our heavy work on infrastructure improvements generated a busy year for our regulatory people as well. We had rate activity in two of our three natural gas states and seven out of our eight water states, including the filing of our Pennsylvania water rate case back in August. Dan's gonna give you a little bit more details on that in just a moment. Our municipal acquisition strategy remains strong as we announce the closing of the Village of Bourbonnais in Illinois, and we added Beaver Falls, a wastewater system in Pittsburgh, to our growing list of pending acquisitions. In total, we've closed two acquisitions this year and have seven pending acquisitions. These nine acquisitions total over $500 million in purchase price. I'm also pleased to announce that we were celebrated as a champion of board diversity by the Forum of Executive Women. While we were also recognized for recently published ESG report with multiple awards, our team did a really nice job. If you haven't had a chance to look at it's really worth the look. This is the third time we've received the Champion of Board Diversity honor, which is awarded to the top public companies in our region with 30% or more women on their respective boards. Really important work to us, and we're very proud of that. We remain focused on reducing the company's carbon footprint. We've already made a significant progress toward our goal by replacing hundreds of miles of leak-prone gas pipe and by significantly increasing our use of renewable energy for our power needs. You've heard this before, but our public commitment to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 60% before 2035 from a 2019 baseline has already produced a 5% reduction in the first year of our commitment. Under our ESG banner, we are evaluating initiatives in renewable natural gas or RNG, responsibly sourced gas or RNG, and hydrogen. We currently procure RNG from about six landfills and are looking for other opportunities to take RNG, including into our distribution system for our utility customers. We're also working with an engineering firm to evaluate RNG facilities at some of our wastewater treatment plants, allowing synergy to be realized between our water and our gas businesses. As part of our increased focus on RNG, we recently joined the RNG Coalition, which is an industry organization that advocates and educates for the sustainable development, deployment, and utilization of RNG. Finally, we're having discussions with several potential partners regarding hydrogen pilots and hope to provide more details on a future earnings call as those concepts develop. I encourage all of you to review our, again, award-winning Essential 2020 ESG report, which highlights some of these environmental initiatives along with several other initiatives. All right, let's turn to a key operational challenge we face resulting from Hurricane Ida. Just before Labor Day weekend, Hurricane Ida made its way through southeastern Pennsylvania and poured nearly 8 inches of rain in 6 hours on two of our key surface water treatment plants. To put that storm event in perspective, that's 20% of the annual rainfall we would normally expect in this region that fell in 6 hours. This sustained and heavy rainfall in the Pickering and Perkiomen Creek watersheds resulted in record flooding in the Philadelphia region, which made national news. The picture you see here is an aerial view of our Pickering West water treatment facility submerged from the storm. This is the largest plant in our fleet. At the height of the storm, we had to shut down the power and abandon this plant. You know, if our team had stayed, they might have drowned in the 8 feet of water that filled their offices. Immediately after the storm subsided, a cross-functional team of managers, employees, and contractors worked round the clock to optimize our other plants because we had needed to bring water into this area, restore the damaged plants, and also communicate with our customers. Our 4-county interconnected system allowed us to adjust our water distribution system to compensate for the loss of approximately 40% of our drinking water supply, which normally comes from the plant you see underwater here. Without the redundancy of our system, maintaining service to our customers would have been impossible, and that's where our long-term planning really showed. We were pleased to maintain service for all of our customers with only a few isolated low pressure issues. Now, a storm like Ida raises some important issues and questions for us and for other utilities for that matter. Questions like, how would a smaller water utility respond to an event of this magnitude, especially a utility that does not have the level of resources or expertise that we have? Another question is, will events like this cause even more smaller water and wastewater utility to consider exiting the business just because of the capital costs and other constraints that to overcome these type of issues? You know, should we expect more extreme weather like this with climate change? A big question for all utilities. Finally, how much capital will we need to address issues like this one at Aqua and at other utilities across the country? These are important questions that we'll have to grapple with. Now in the next slide, I just want to point out the pictures here. You can see the damage and the team. And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it was the efforts of our workforce and their dedication to our customers that got our plants back online and allowed us to maintain service throughout that challenging time. I am really proud and honored to be part of such a resilient team, and to say they did a great job would simply be an understatement. We have a long list of lessons learned from this incident and are well into the planning necessary to overcome these challenges in the future. All right, let's shift gears into the financials, and I'm gonna pass the call along to Dan. Dan? Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. Before I move into our results, knowing the question is likely coming, please keep in mind that we have insurance to help mitigate impacts of a storm event like Ida. While not certain, we'll also seek to recover any storm-related costs not covered by insurance. That said, however, the results we'll describe next include the revenue impacts of voluntary conservation efforts and the increased expenses associated with Ida. Furthermore, we'd expect any major changes to Pickering Treatment Plant configuration to be included in future capital plans. Let's start with the third quarter financial highlights. We ended the third quarter with revenues of $361.9 million, up about 3.8% from last year. Our regulated water segment contributed $259.9 million, and our regulated natural gas segment contributed $94.8 million. O&M expenses increased 2.3% to $139.4 million in the third quarter, up from $136.2 million in the third quarter of last year. Net income was down year-over-year from $55.7 million to $50.5 million, and GAAP earnings per share decreased from $0.22 to $0.19. Next, we'll walk through the waterfall slide, starting with revenue. As we walk through the $13.2 million revenue increase in the third quarter of 2021, you'll notice the main drivers were purchased gas, adding $8.7 million, and rates and surcharges, contributing $8.2 million. Q3 2020 rate credit, growth from our regulated water segment, and other provided an additional $6.9 million towards the revenue increase. These revenue increases were offset by decreased volume, resulting in a $9.6 million decline in our water segment and an approximately $1 million reduction in our gas segment. As a result of the weather conditions, the return to post-COVID normalcy, and Ida-related conservation in Pennsylvania, we experienced water consumption reduction in 7 of our 8 water states. I'd like to pause here for a moment and discuss the impact of the increase in natural gas prices. While heating degree days in the third quarter were down when compared to the same period in 2020, gas prices have significantly increased year-over-year, as you've read in the news. Due to increased gas commodity costs, we anticipate that our average customer bill for the 2021/2022 winter heating season will be approximately 25% higher than last winter. However, there's some important things to note. Prior to the recent run-up in gas commodity costs, the commodity itself only represented about 20% of the typical Peoples customer's bill. Even with these increased gas commodity costs, the anticipated $1,130 bill is far short of the record highs from 2008, when the average annual bill was approximately $1,800. Also, we've approximately 47% of our winter gas needs already in storage, much of which was purchased at significantly lower prices than today's spot prices, which helps to dampen the impact of the commodity price increase. Lastly, I'd point out that the prices that Peoples pays for natural gas are consistently discounted compared to the NYMEX due to the basis differential that exists between NYMEX and the Marcellus basin pricing. This is a real advantage of procuring and providing locally sourced natural gas. With that, let's take a more detailed look at water consumption by customer class. We wanted to take the opportunity to update you on water usage trends as more of the population returns to pre-COVID lifestyles. For the third quarter, water usage declined by 5.2% from last year, returning to the 2019 level of approximately 19 billion gallons. The continued trend of businesses reopening and our customers returning to their workplaces, along with weather impacts and conservation efforts in Pennsylvania due to Hurricane Ida, resulted in a residential usage decrease of 8.1% and a commercial usage increase of 2.8% when compared to the same period in 2020. As a reminder, historically in the water business, we see a natural decline of about 1% annually as customers change out older appliances and fixtures. Operations and maintenance expenses were $139.4 million for the third quarter, up 2.3% compared to $136.2 million in the third quarter of 2020. The main driver was employee-related costs of $6.8 million for the quarter, which included $1.7 million of increased medical costs, plus pension expenses and normal employee expenses. Similar to last quarter, the increase in medical expenses over 2020 was expected, as many people that had delayed non-emergency medical visits have begun to catch up on physicals and other medical appointments. Other items, including Hurricane Ida repair expenses, added $3.8 million, and growth in production costs for the regulated water segment added another $1.9 million. However, these increases were offset by almost $9.4 million in COVID-19 costs when compared to Q3 2020. You'll recall those, that was really bad debt and some sort of one-time bonuses we did last year for non-management employees. We're starting to experience some inflation-related increases, specifically in the areas of fuel, chemicals, and insurance, and we're reflecting those in our 2022 budget. Next, we'll review the earnings per share waterfall. GAAP EPS for the third quarter decreased by $0.03 from $0.22 in 2020 to $0.19 this year. As we mentioned on the last call, we expected this quarter to be at the lower end of the range we provided for Q3 early in the year. Rates and surcharges added $0.022. The Q3 2020 rate credits contributed $0.011, and growth in our regulated water segment, another $0.004. These were offset by O&M of $0.028, lower volume from both our regulated water segment and our regulated natural gas segment of $0.029 combined, and another half cent from other items, which brought us to GAAP EPS of $0.19 for the third quarter of 2021. For the full year, presuming normal weather, our earnings per share results should be around the midpoint of our stated guidance range of $1.64-$1.69. Moving on to rate activity and other matters. So far in 2021, we've completed rate cases or surcharges in seven of our eight water states with total annualized revenue of $31 million. In our regulated natural gas segment, we've completed rate case or surcharge filings in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, with total annualized revenue of $1.3 million. We currently have base rate cases underway for our regulated water segment subsidiaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as for one of our regulated natural gas subsidiaries, the one in Kentucky known as Delta Natural Gas. As many of you know, we filed the rate case for our Aqua Pennsylvania subsidiary in August, in line with the three-year rate case cadence we had outlined previously. The primary driver of the rate case filing is the $1.1 billion in capital investments since the last case. These expenditures funded the replacement of more than 400 miles of aging water mains and associated valve services and hydrants throughout Aqua Pennsylvania's approximately 5,800-mile distribution system, plus wastewater treatment plant upgrades, PFAS, PFOA filters, and our new Bryn Mawr laboratory. These types of investments in the communities that we serve allow us to continue our long history of consistently providing safe drinking water to our customers and returning clean, treated wastewater to the environment. Now, one unique aspect of this filing is the request for the first water-focused universal services program in Pennsylvania. We were asked to file this as part of our Peoples Acquisition settlement, and we're looking forward to having a universal services program as an important way of helping our low-income water and wastewater customers. While we're often viewed as having a suburban customer base, in fact, approximately 10% of our water and wastewater customers here in Pennsylvania are living below the federal poverty level. In terms of the schedule, direct testimony is due on November tenth, and evidentiary hearings are scheduled before the holidays. We anticipate having new rates effective in May of 2022. With that, I'll hand it back over to Chris. Chris? Great. Thanks, Dan. Let's talk a little bit about our status of municipal transactions. You can see on this slide that during the quarter we announced the closing of the Village of Bourbonnais. This wastewater system serves about 6,500 customers in Kankakee County, Illinois. Then in October, we announced the signing of an asset purchase agreement with Beaver Falls, and this one's a wastewater system in the Pittsburgh area, which serves about 7,600 customer equivalents. This one's important because it gives us a water foothold in Western Pennsylvania, in addition to our already strong gas platform in that same area. It's an important one for us. Now, as of this call, we've signed seven asset purchase agreements, and they're all pending, which will add over 234,000 customers or customer equivalents and a total of $460 million, almost $468 million in purchase price. These seven pending transactions, plus the two closed transactions, will add over 241,000 customers or customer equivalents again, and a total of over $500 million in combined purchase price. We remain confident that we will close the DELCORA transaction. The litigation with Delaware County regarding the enforceability of our asset purchase agreement with DELCORA was heard by a three-judge panel in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth Court, back on October 18 of this year, just a couple of weeks ago, and a decision is expected in the first half of next year. We're also still hopeful that we can reach a settlement with the county which would help accelerate the closing of this transaction. I'm sure I'll answer questions with it when you have them in a few moments. In addition to the signed municipal transactions we just discussed, our pipeline of municipal opportunities remains healthy and strong. Key contributors to the strength of our pipeline include fair market value legislation in all of our states, the fair regulatory environments where we operate now, and where we operate the strong offering of solutions we bring to municipalities, including low-cost capital, our expertise, and long-term rate stability. Now, this table includes acquisition opportunities where we are engaged in active discussions with municipalities. As the slide demonstrates, we are actively pursuing about 400,000 potential water and wastewater customers, so a very healthy pipeline. Many of you have asked about the Chester Water Authority. It's in the news all the time. You'll recall that this is a water utility with about 44,000 customers. It serves in two counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, along with the city of Chester. On September sixteenth, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled in a 5-2 decision that the city of Chester is the rightful owner of the Chester Water Authority. Pending approval from the state-appointed receiver, the city is in a bankruptcy proceeding, but so the state-appointed receiver, the city now plans to sign an asset purchase agreement with Aqua to sell the asset. In fact, just after the court decision was released, the Chester City Council unanimously passed a public ordinance declaring Aqua the winner of its request for proposal process and requesting that the receiver expeditiously provide approval to sell the Chester Water Authority to Aqua. All right. Let me wrap up the formal remarks today by reaffirming our 2021 guidance as we continue to expect earnings to be between $64-$69 per share. Our capital plan continues to remain on track as we anticipate spending about $1 billion this year on regulated infrastructure and about $3 billion across our Essential platform by 2023. As we indicated last quarter, the final mix of our 2021 capital spending will be weighted toward the regulated water segment. Customer growth is expected to be between 2%-3% on average for our regulated water segment. Even as DELCORA transaction has been pushed out in time, we remain confident in our ability to achieve this 5%-7% earnings growth over the 3-year period ending in 2023. This is our current guidance period. Finally, our commitment and our continued progress on environmental stewardship, sustainable business practices, employee safety, diversity and inclusion, customer experience, and community engagement allows us to demonstrate our leadership on ESG-related issues in the industry. With that, let me conclude my formal remarks and turn it over to you, Lauren, to open the call for questions. Thank you. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, that is star one to ask a question. We'll take our first question from Insoo Kim with Goldman Sachs. Hey, Insoo. Yeah. Thank you. Hey, good morning, guys. First question related to Hey. Hello. Related to Hurricane Ida. Could you just tell us what the total costs there associated with that was in terms of maybe capital and, you know, operating expense? Did any of the operating costs get deferred at all, or were what we are seeing in the results all reflecting the Opex? Yeah, great question, Insoo. Let me just walk through this. In terms of expenses, they are reflected in the results, are $2.1 million. We don't expect to have trailing expenses into the fourth quarter from Ida. In terms of capital so far, about $1.7 million. Now capital, there will be future capital associated with that Pickering plant that Chris talked about earlier. Then the conservation related consumption there, we estimate that to be about $2 million, but that's hard to pin down exactly. Insoo, it's important to note that as Dan kind of alluded to, we have some questions to answer for ourselves at that plant and follow on capital. One, obviously we need to get the plant to a point where it produces the level of quality water that it did before. It's producing quality water, but we need to continue to increase its capacity. The question is, do we rebuild on-site higher walls, you know, and waterproof doors, all that sort of thing? Or do we move some of these things to a higher ground on that same property, which would obviously be increased cost, capital cost. Those are things that we're still wrestling with. I think that's what Dan's alluding to in terms of how we think about future capital. Right. Let me just address kind of the other part of your question there, Insoo. You know, as I noted earlier in the kind of prepared remarks, you know, we will seek insurance recovery, and we'll also seek recovery from through the regular regulatory process for those expenses that I mentioned. Right. Maybe just as a follow-up to this one. In terms of these treatment plants that were affected, are they all fully functioning? When we think about just, you know, operating costs going forward and delivering the treated water, you know, we're kind of back to normal versus maybe in the next quarter or two still having to, you know, utilize the other plants, that can maybe increase the cost profile a little bit. Yeah. I would say for all intents and purposes, it's back to normal. We do have what we call clear well, this is where the finished water sits that was collapsed under that, so we can't store as much finished water there. The plants themselves are operating well. You know, we have some tweaks yet to do, but I would not expect the current situation to result in added expense. Yep, agreed. Got it. My last question is on your growth rate. You know, you reiterated the 5%-7%. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think when we had prior discussions, when we just think about the longer term, maybe beyond that 2021-2023 period, you know, I think you've mentioned that there could be potential, you know, incremental upside opportunities on a longer term basis. As we look forward to, you know, conclude this year and, you know, look at a new multi-year growth rate, any latest thoughts on achieving, maybe something more robust given, you know, the potential outcomes in the PA rate case or, DELCORA timing, among others? Yeah, I think I'll reserve comment on as we give next year's guidance. We typically haven't gone out beyond that three-year window we've provided. Well, why don't we chat about that when we come to our guidance call? Got it. Is that gonna be early next year as typical, sometime in that January period? It'll be early next year. Could be January, February timeframe. Yep, we haven't locked down exactly the date. We also wanna take a look at what's happening with some of the growth projects we're working on, so that we align that timing with when we can maybe have some good news. Got it. Thank you so much. You bet. Thanks, Insoo Kim. Our next question comes from Ryan Greenwald with Bank of America. Hey, Ryan. Hey, Ryan. Good morning, team. Maybe to start, it seems like the EPA is taking a bit more active role just in terms of PFOS and emerging contaminants with the roadmap that they've recently announced. Any initial thoughts around how this is gonna impact the municipal pipeline and acquisition opportunities? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, generally, and a lot of the specifics are yet to come from the EPA, but especially as we talk about MCL, you know, maximum contaminant levels and that sort of thing. I think we are generally of the opinion that the more stringent it becomes, the more difficult it is for smaller or mid-size even utilities who don't have our level of expertise to meet those compliance levels. It should put more utilities in a position where they're struggling and they're looking for solutions like we can bring. Again, generally given there are not a whole lot of specifics out there yet, I would say it would help in our municipal acquisition program. Got it. Fair enough. Maybe on a similar note, just in terms of the infrastructure bill and the latest from the House here around reconciliation, any thoughts, any updated thoughts in terms of how you guys are thinking about potential impact there? Well, the way we think about this, in the scheme of the needs in water and wastewater across the country, infrastructure, that is, it's even though it seems like it's a decent size, when you consider the needs, particularly of larger cities and some of the needs around storm water, it's a drop in the bucket. We don't see it as an impact to our growth plans. We hope that if we have, you know, access to, or if the utilities have access to low cost money or no cost money, we would actively look at that as well to keep rates down for our customers. Generally, we don't see it having an impact on our acquisition program. Got it. Maybe just one more, if I may. In terms of the competitive landscape, NextEra was pretty vocal around kind of expanded water efforts here with their latest update. Anything in terms of what you guys are seeing as you go in for the bids here in terms of changes to how competitive it is out there or any states in particular where you're seeing more competition in tuck-in pursuits? Well, you know, we have seen NextEra in a couple of situations in Pennsylvania and in Texas. Certainly, we've seen their comments in the market. Frankly, we've been fairly welcoming to the electric utilities as they come into our space and bring more clout to regulated water. Listen, as we think about this privatization trend, the more that occurs successfully, the better it is. We think about this as a pretty big market. We've certainly been successful in our market share, and we think we can continue to do that. As electrics enter the business, they've got to build their water expertise. I think the offerings. Remember that they, despite their large customer base, existing customer base and rate base, they can't spread their water costs on their electric customers. They've still got to confine any rate increases for acquisitions on those customers they have. We bring, I think, a pretty competitive position in any time we're competing with, you know, electrics or those new entries to the market, given our size, our scale, our capabilities. Not too worried about it. Great. I'll leave it there. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan. Our next question comes from Travis Miller with Morningstar. Hey, Travis. Good morning. Thank you. All right. Hi. I was wondering, as you look at perhaps your regulatory team, any other states you're seeing or, and even federal, but stick to the states, where fair market value legislation or regulation is working its ways through various halls of government? Yeah, I mean, I know it's taken hold. We have it in all of our states where we do business now, or some form of it, right? It's not always called fair market value, you know. We're really comfortable in the states where we are. I can't tell you exactly where outside of our footprint it may be moving through. It seems to be taking hold in a lot of different places beyond our states as well. When you think about the capacity you guys have internally for doing acquisitions, particularly in the water acquisitions, give me a sense for how much capacity you have to do those acquisitions. When you think about, you know, currently, you talked about $500 million or so rate base, even if you could take out DELCORA, somewhere in the $250 or so about pending deals. Can you go much above that just in terms of executing and closing the deals, soliciting more deals, stuff like that? Yes. Yes, I think we can. Here's why. We have a combination of things we use for our workforce in the various states. We have a state president and a state business development person in every state, both of whom have responsibility for growth. We supplement that with others, both inside the business and outside the business to help us accelerate growth. Those could be consultants, they could be former political people, that sort of thing that help us with these municipal acquisitions. A lot of these acquisitions take a lot of time, as you know. I mean, I know there's frustration around how long it's taken with DELCORA in particular. Given the amount of time they take in terms of getting to APA and also sometimes ultimately getting to closing, there's time to fill in around the edges to keep a lot of them in the air. In addition to those state teams I described, you've all met Matt Rhodes, you know, Matt and his team here at headquarters, which help facilitate that as well. Now we've plugged some people in out in our western area in at Peoples, who are notable people in that region to help us with some of the water projects as well. I think we have deep capabilities to continue to build our municipal program. Okay. Great. Now that's all I had. Thanks so much. Thanks, Travis. Take care, Travis. Our next question comes from Ryan Connors with Boenning & Scattergood. Hey, Ryan. Thanks for taking my question. Good morning. A couple big-picture questions. First, wanted to go back to the talk you had there with your first question regarding Ida. Chris, you mentioned, you know, still sort of formulating your thoughts about whether to build back in kind or to build back, you know, with a more robust flood proofing. Obviously, a lot of that will be dictated by what the commission thinks about rate recovery and things like that. Is there any early read or color? Obviously, you probably had some discussions, informal and otherwise. Any idea how they're looking at things like that in terms of cost benefit? Would they rather you spend the rate base and build against that rare flood? Or would they just say, "You know what? You guys seemed to handle it pretty quick, got it back up and running pretty quick. Let's just let it ride." What's their thinking? Yeah. I thought for a second there, you were gonna ask me if I was gonna build back better, Ryan. You stayed away from that. Yeah, I think you raise an important question and one that we're spending a lot of time on. What we've done is we said, "Okay, what's the probability that a storm of this magnitude would hit our plant? And then what are the various improvements we could make to the plant?" It's almost like, you know, I'll use a slang term here, a submarine door, right, on our doors to the plant. What could we do to reinforce that plant so that it wouldn't take on water at the same level again? We're saying, "Okay, let's think about the probability of a storm like that and then the reinforcement we could do to keep it from getting the level of damage it did this time versus moving at least aspects of that plant to higher ground." We have a pretty good-sized property there. What are those costs? How do we think about that from a timing standpoint? In other words, could they be spread out over a period of years and therefore cost impact be mitigated to customers? The questions you raised are good ones that we are grappling with ourselves. I don't have final solutions, but rest assured that that'll be a conversation with the regulators as well to make sure that we're all aligned and whatever we do, we get the proper regulatory treatment. Yep. Okay. Still up in the air. Yeah. I wanted to actually probe your initial comment I thought was interesting in your prepared remarks about your investor relations survey and the comments you made about gas and M&A. I mean, what scenario, if any, could you envision yourself diverging from that intention not to pursue M&A and gas? For example, you know, if the PUC in Pennsylvania or Kentucky or West Virginia were to tap you on the shoulder and say, "Look, we have a troubled asset here, you know, can you help us out?" You know, those types of situations, is there any situation where you could envision yourself, you know, being receptive to something like that? Or is it just sort of real black and white on that? Yeah. I think it's real black and white, Ryan, at this point. I just think as a public company and looking at the current multiples, it's just difficult to see a path where you'd wanna add additional natural gas. That's not to say that we in any way are thinking less of our gas utility contribution. I mean, listen, this is a utility that you know, the acquisition went well. It's exceeding all of our expectations and our targets we set for ourselves, safety, financial contribution, capital plan. It's exceeding all of our targets very nicely. It's a great addition to our company and operating extremely well. Hard to say that it would be good sense to add to that today. We are entirely focused on growing the water utility. Our keen focus of our management team in Pittsburgh and on the gas utility is focused on the things I talked about, replacing that pipe, making it more secure, safe, reliable, and environmentally sound. I think it's a solid strategy at this point on the gas side, but it's solely focused on the capital program and those aspects I just mentioned. We're not gonna grow in gas through acquisition. Got it. Okay. My last one, you know, quickly, you've been a good source of keeping us up to date on the Pennsylvania, you know, sort of the soap opera with the commission and the vacancies there and some of the gamesmanship with the governor around appointments and things like that. Can you just give us the latest on where that stands with the commissioners' situation in Pennsylvania? Yeah. I guess the easiest way to say it is no change. The commission remains at three members, two Republicans and one Democrat, despite the fact that the governor is a Democrat. The chairman appointed by the governor is the only Democrat on the commission. We would not expect, given the governor's continued strong position on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, RGGI, and the state Senate's opposition to his position, frankly, that he could enter that position without their approval or consent. The Senate is not gonna move on his appointments, and so we don't see any change in that. Unless the governor were to change his policy, the Senate says they're gonna hold firm. It could go through the whole year next year with the commission remaining in much the status that it is today. Okay. Well, hey, that's helpful. Thanks for all your time today. You bet, Ryan. Our next question comes from Jonathan Reeder with Wells Fargo. Hey, Jonathan. Good morning, Jonathan. Hey, Dan, how are you guys doing this morning? Pretty well. Good. Good. Most of my questions have been answered. I got two left for you, though. Any word from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court regarding whether it's gonna take up the appeal of the lower court's order by the CWA? No, no word from the Supreme Court yet. It could take them a few months to give an answer on that, whether they decide to take it up or not. Okay. It still could be a few months before we even hear if they're taking it up. Then if they do, you have another, what is it? Is it 9 months to a year for an order or... I mean, I think that's a fair estimate. Hopefully not that long, but I think it would be fair to say it could be that long. Okay, great. I know you mentioned Chester City Council voted to move forward and sign the APA, and they asked the receiver to give his blessing to it. What's kind of the process and timeline for the receiver to act? Yeah. There's not a public timeline for the receiver at this point. I think that's one of the things that the city is pressing for today. The receiver has some important work to do, obviously balancing the city's finances, but in the meantime, it is literally running out of money on the pensions. They're almost out of cash, and so very difficult to not do anything. There are some impending, let's just say, burning platforms that need to be addressed. While the city is pressing the receiver, its next step would probably be to go to the Commonwealth Court that oversees the receiver and ask the receiver or the court for a defined timeline. We understand that that's where they may go, but that's entirely up to the city and in terms of the next step. Okay. Okay. Yeah, no, I thought I had read something about that pension issue and yeah, there was just kind of a few months left. I guess it would be your expectation that you could at least get something from the receiver prior to that, and then your bid has that upfront payment, and that allows kind of Chester to stay afloat. Yes. Yes. Okay. That's exactly right. Okay. Well, good luck with that. Looking forward to hearing updates going forward. You bet. Thank you. Yeah. Take care, Jonathan. As a reminder, that is star one to ask a question. Our next question comes from Verity Mitchell with HSBC. Hey, Verity. Good morning. Hey, Verity. Hi. I've got a question. I'm very interested in your opening remarks about RSG and capture from wastewater treatment plants. Just quite a simple question, but I'm sure you'd like to unpack it a bit. Would that be something that would be added to rate base if it was initiated? I mean, how do you recover the investment on capturing RSG from wastewater treatment plants? It's a great question. I'm not sure we've fully come to terms with whether that's rate base or not. I guess, you know, as you think about Verity, let's step back one step first. Most of our plants, and we have over 200 wastewater plants in the fleet now, but most of our plants are too small to consider an operation like this. As we acquire larger plants or as we build them, i.e., DELCORA would be maybe an example, you know, are there opportunities to then create some energy. I think when it comes down to whether it would be rate base or not, a lot of that question comes to what is the impact ultimately to the rate payer. As we think about there's a lot of moving parts to this, do we keep or sell any credits that we might gain? Obviously, keeping the credit is good for our ESG. Selling the credit might be good for customers. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here because we don't even have a project like this yet. These are things we're strongly considering as we start to acquire larger and larger facilities. I think the end of the story is probably more to come on this. Dan, I don't know if you have anything you wanna comment in addition. No, not really. I mean, you can. You know, what we've seen in the past in certain situations, if someone has an anaerobic digester and they generate RSG or RNG from their own wastewater treatment plant, they would use that on site. Potentially, that could be included in rate base, but there may be an offset in expense because there would be less in terms of purchased energy that would go to the customer. You know, that's another way to think about it. Yep. sort of the nexus here between the water and wastewater business and the gas business, how that RSG is used or RNG is used, still to be determined here. As Chris said, Verity can think of more to come on this one from us. Great. Thanks. We have no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the conference back to Christopher Franklin for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you, Lauren, and thank you all for joining us today. Obviously, Dan, Brian, myself, all available for follow-up questions if you have them. Thanks for joining us, and have a great day. That does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.