Welcome to the CrossAmerica Partners' First Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. My name is Vanessa, and I'll be your operator for today's call. [Operator instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Jon Benfield, Interim Chief Financial Officer.

Begin. Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining the CrossAmerica Partners' First Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. With me today are Charles Nifong, CEO and President, and other members of our executive leadership team. I should point out that today's call will follow some presentation slides that we will utilize during this morning's event. These slides are available as part of the webcast and are posted on the CrossAmerica website. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that today's call, including the question-and-answer session, may include forward-looking statements regarding expected revenue, future plans, future operational metrics and opportunities and expectations of the organization. There can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs and projections will be achieved or that actual results will not differ from expectations. Please see CrossAmerica's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for discussion of important factors that could affect our actual results. Forward-looking statements represents the judgment of CrossAmerica's management as of today's date, and the organization disclaims any intent or obligation update any forward-looking statement. During today's call, we may also provide certain performance measures that do not conform to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. We provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings press release. Today's call is being webcast, and a recording of this conference call will be available on the CrossAmerica website for a period of 60 days. With that, I will now turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Jon. I hope that everyone is doing well in these challenging times. Although we are here today on our first quarter earnings call, we understand that everyone's focus is on COVID-19 and its impact on our business in the period since the quarter end as well as any thoughts that we can offer about our business going forward in the current environment. Given that, we will structure our comments on today's call differently than what we normally do. I will briefly go through some of the highlights for the first quarter and then let Jon review in more detail the financial results. After that, I will provide an update on the business since the quarter end and specifically address the impact of COVID-19. If you turn to Slide 4, I will briefly review some of our results from the quarter. For the first quarter of 2020, our wholesale fuel volume declined 5% when compared to the first quarter of 2019, largely due to the impacts of COVID-19. Beginning in mid-March, specifically around March 12, we have begun to see sudden and significant declines in our volumes as economic activities begin to curtail due to measures taken to fight COVID-19. This decline in volume for the quarter was more than offset by a strong increase in our year-over-year wholesale fuel margin per gallon, driving our wholesale fuel gross profit up 35% for the quarter. Our wholesale fuel margin of $0.09 per gallon, an increase of 41% year-over-year, was primarily driven by our dealer-tank-wagon fuel margins, which as a reminder are variable fuel margin accounts for certain of our third-party wholesale dealers and also how we supply our company-operated and commissioned retail sites. Crude oil prices went from $61 a barrel on December 31, 2019, to just over $20 a…

Thank you, Charles. Please turn to Slide 7, I would like to review our first quarter results for the partnership. We reported adjusted EBITDA of $25.3 million for the first quarter of 2020 compared to $21.4 million for the same period of 2019, reflecting an increase of 18%. Our distributable cash flow for the first quarter of 2020 was $20.4 million versus $13.3 million for the first quarter of 2019, reflecting an increase of 54% year-over-year. Both adjusted EBITDA and distributable cash flow for the first quarter benefited from the performance of our wholesale segment and lower overall expenses. Distributable cash flow also benefited from lower cash interest and current tax expense. Our distribution coverage on a paid basis for the first quarter of 2020 was 1.08x versus 0.73x for the first quarter of 2019. Our distribution coverage on a trailing 12-month basis was 1.19x, which was an improvement over the 1.03x that we experienced for the 12 months ended March 31, 2019. If you would please turn to the next slide, Slide 8. We ended the quarter with a leverage ratio as defined under our credit facility of 4.19x and remain in compliance with our financial covenant ratios. We have sufficient liquidity to execute our plans. And as of May 1, we had $152.6 million available on our credit facility, an increase of $60.7 million compared to our availability from December 31, 2019. With the overall decline in interest rates, we recently made the decision to enter into an interest rate swap contract. On March 26, we entered into an interest rate swap contract to hedge against interest rate volatility on our variable rate borrowings under the credit facility. The interest payments on our credit facility vary based on monthly changes in 1-month LIBOR and changes, if any, in…

Thank you, Jon. While pandemics may not be a new or even an unusual occurrence, the disruption associated with COVID-19 is certainly unprecedented and has dramatically impacted us all. Given the unique circumstances, we wanted to provide you with additional color today on impact of COVID-19 to the partnership. We typically do not provide this level of detail. But these are unusual times, and we want to be as transparent as possible to our investors. First, in terms of volume, as I briefly touched on earlier, we begin to see dramatic declines in volume around March 12. We are watching volume on a day-by-day basis, particularly at our retail sites, and can see the sudden and dramatic changes happening in the economy in real time. The volume declines, both on a year-over-year basis and a week-over-week basis, accelerated through the end of March, but then began to stabilize at the beginning of April. Since early April, we have seen moderate increases in overall same-site week-over-week volume. Currently, our volumes in the most recent weekly are period off around 40% on a same-site year-over-year comparable week basis. The impact varies by geography. Alabama, for example, is off around 28% on a same-site year-over-year comparable week basis, while our New Jersey sites are off around 58% on a same-site year-over-year comparable week basis. The encouraging news from our volume is that we have seen modest improvement in recent weeks. And as more states look to lift or ease up on lockdown restrictions, we are hopeful that trend will continue. With the completion of our recent retail acquisition, about 25% of our portfolio by gallons is now variable margin. These are either our own retail sites, operated by us or commissioned agents or our variable rate third-party wholesale customers, which we also refer…

Okay. Well, this is Charles again. So I guess that means that we did an adequate job of addressing everyone's concerns in our commentary. So again, we appreciate your interest in the partnership, and thank you for taking part in the call today.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.