Martin Kropelnicki
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is open
Great. Thanks, Dave. Before I give the outlook on -- for 2018, 2 weeks ago, I was at the NARUC, the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners'. And I was on the general session panel talking about the new tax laws. And there was a lot of interest in the first layer of the tax law, which is just the overall lowering of the corporate tax rate, the change of 14% from 35% to 21%, which generally is a good thing, because it makes us more efficient. It helps keep our rates low and allows us to get more capital in the ground. But as I describe it to the regulators, and I was on this panel with Moody's and some Commissioner and a Executive Director of water division within 1 state, I called it the good, the bad, the ugly. The good is the lower overall tax rate, that's actually a very good thing. The bad, and frankly, it's a very bad thing for the utility space is the loss of bonus depreciation, it's the loss of the qualified facilities deduction and it's the fully taxable CIAC, Contributions in Aid of Construction. And then the ugly really is the deferred tax assets and deferred tax liabilities to the extent that state has deferred tax asset, that means the customer owes us the money to the extent we have a deferred tax liability, we owe the customer money. And as you refund that deferred tax liability, you're essentially increasing rate base because in the ratemaking process, deferred tax is net out and lower overall rate base. So the ugly part is pretty ugly. And the tax bill is somewhat nebulous in a lot of areas. So further guidance from the Treasury Department is really important and from the Commissions to figure out how we're going to deal with this. And as Dave said, the overall concern as expressed by, for example, Moody's, is they put a negative outlook on the whole utility industry as everyone figures out the FFO to debt or the cash flow from operations to debt ratios. So having said that, just remember the good, the bad, and the ugly and as we all work through this process over the next 12 months with the Commission to figure out how we're going to proceed on it. Looking ahead for 2018, a couple of things I'd like to point out. One, for 2018, we anticipate our capital investment range to be $200 million to $220 million. That's a little bit lower than where we were in 2017, that is by design. If you recall, strategically, we changed the way we were planning our capital cycle. So we can maximize our step increases during the second and third year of the rate case. So 2017 was the -- really the third year of the capital component of our rate case. And so we really knocked that out of the park. As we put in the slide deck, we received approval for almost a $16 million step increase, that's the largest step increase the company has achieved and that was over 91% of the overall target that we were able to obtain. Along with that, looking in 2018, we anticipate depreciation to be $6 million or $7 million higher, and we expect the interest cost associated with the higher capital investments to be another $2 million. So essentially, there's $8 million or $9 million of cost that will net out against the overall step increase. In addition, through January 1, the CPUC has approved advice letters for the State of California for capital projects totaling an additional $2.8 million in annual revenue out of a total available additional project budget of about $30 million. So for 2018, we're going to be keenly focused on wiping out the rest of those advice letter projects as we go into a rate case year. At this time, we're estimating that our effective tax rate will be about 24%, much closer to the statutory rate of 28%. And that's really due to the reduced budgets for repairs projects that we have within 2018 and the deductions that go along with that. This could change as the new law gets interpreted and guidance comes out from the Treasury Department, the IRS and the Commission. The unbilled revenue that Tom mentioned being high, we've had a very, very dry winter. In fact, as of Tuesday, our snowpack was about 23% normal. So that was a very dry winter for us, which meant consumption stayed high going through December and January. We are facing a very large winter storm right now and expected snowfall on the Sierra is as of this morning for the next 4 days is 60 to 80 inches. The significance of that is it sets us up -- the state up for very well for the snowpack reading on April 1 provided that, that the climate stay cool enough not to melt that into runoff. So the unbilled occurrence is really kind of unique to have an unbilled revenue that high. And usually, we see that reverse in the fourth quarter and not actually add to income. And really -- that really just -- it's our revenue accrual at the end of the quarter. We usually see that reverse out. Beginning in the first quarter of 2018, there is some changes in GAAP that are important in the non-service component of the pension expense and this gets a little actuarial-ish. But when you look at pension expense, you have the calculation of what's called the normal cost. And within that normal cost, it helps determine what the average cost is per employee. And then you have this other piece called non-service component. So it could be unamortized losses. If for example, and we don't do this at Cal Water, but if we had a real estate investments that went bankrupt, you would have unamortized loss that you'd be adding into your service component. We don't have anything like that. But to the extent, we have -- you might have some passive losses that you have to recognize within a year from some of your investments, that will start flowing through other income and expense due to the implementation of ASU 2017-07. And for any questions on that, call Dave Healy for dial-in. I haven't been a CFO for a while and I don't miss the old actuarial days. Paul, do you want to give an update on the rate case?