Good morning and welcome to the Northwest Natural Gas Company First Quarter 2013 Teleconference. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Bob Hess. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Amy. Good morning everybody and welcome to our first quarter earnings call for 2013. As a reminder, as always some of the things that will be said this morning contain forward-looking statements. They are based on management’s assumptions, which may or may not come true, and you should refer to the language at the end of our press release both the appropriate cautionary statements and also our SEC filings for additional information. We expect to file our 10-Q later today. As mentioned, this teleconference is being recorded and will be available on our website following the call. Please note that these conference calls are designed for the financial community. If you’re an individual investor and have questions, please contact me directly at area code 503-220-2388, media should contact Kim Heiting directly at area code 503-220-2366. Speaking this morning are Gregg Kantor, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Steve Feltz Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Gregg and Steve have some opening remarks and then will be available to answer your questions. Also joining us today are other members of our executive team including David Anderson, Executive Vice President of Operations and Regulation will be available to help answer any questions you may have. We look forward to see many of you at the upcoming American Gas Association Financial Forum next week, you have any questions about that event please contact me. With that it’s my pleasure to turn the call over to Gregg.

Thanks Bob. Good morning and welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me start this morning with a summary of the first quarter results and turn it over to Steve Feltz to cover the financial details. I will end with the look ahead before opening it up for questions. As you know, this is the first full quarter we have reported on since the conclusion of last year’s Oregon rate case. And there are few elements of the case affecting the year-over-year comparison that require some explanation. Steve will talk you through the specifics, but at a high level there were two items approves in the rate case that are changing the seasonality of our earnings. Now that our decoupling to full amounts have been incorporated into our base rates, we are going to see those revenues coming in more evenly over 12 months rather than collections more heavily weighted during the winter heating season. Regulators also approved an increased to our fixed charge which moved some expenses out of the volumetric part of customers’ bills. This means we will be collecting those revenues more evenly throughout the year as well. Together, those items had an earnings impact of about $0.11 in the year-over-year comparison for the quarter, but that impact is due to timing and we will see revenues from those billing changes reflected in the next few quarters. Another major item affecting results in the period was lower gas cost savings from our PGA sharing mechanism that we had this time last year. Operationally, there was god news in the quarter O&M was down slightly primarily due to lower bad debt expense and customer growth picked up to 1.1% on a rolling 12 month basis. Overall, we are seeing positive signs in our economy. By the end of…

Thank you, Gregg and good morning everyone. Before I start I just like to say what a great privilege this for me to be reporting to you as CFO of Northwest Natural. And although this is my first earnings call manual, I feel comfortable having 30 years with the company and having the benefit of working with some other best in the industry. With that, let me get started on the quarterly financial results. First quarter net income was $38 million, or $1.40 per share, this compared to net income of 40 million, or $1.50 per share in 2012. As Gregg mentioned, results were lower than last year for reasons that need some explanation. According to Tony margin declined 5.9 million, which accounted from most of the decreases compared to last. The margin decline, of course, was partly due to the general rate decreased approved in Oregon, which running those factor in the fourth quarter of 2012. However, the largest impact excluding this quarter’s drop in margin was due to timing changes in base rates in the Oregon rate case. As we discussed in the fourth quarter conference call, there were two changes in the rate case that would result in revenue timing differences as compared to last year. And the impact would be a margin reduction in the first and fourth quarters have margin increases in the second and third quarters. The first of the two items was a changed in the decoupling baseline, which was reset for the first time since 2003. During that 10-year period of time, we’ve been recovering margin losses from declining news for customer, primarily due to decoupling deferral. The second of the fact was the increase in the customer’s monthly charge. This change allows us to recover more of our fixed cost through…

Thanks, Steve. Without question, our key objective of this year is successful resolution of the outstanding rate case items. As Steve said, we expect to get a decision on the majority of these dockets, late this year or early next year. However, one important regulatory development that has occurred is related to our system integrity program. This tracker allows us to recover capital cost related to the pipeline integrity work up to a certain amount in share. It’s been instrumental and helping us to make significant system safety improvements to keep up with the federal requirements. We just signed a stipulation with the OPUC to modify our tracker to increase the amounts we can recover in rates. On commission approval of this new agreement, over the next two years will track into rates up to $29.7 million including nearly all of our bare steel replacement by the end of 2015. Also on the regulatory front, I am pleased to report we are putting the final touches on a utility tariff we plan to file within the next several weeks to provide customers high pressure gas service for CNG vehicle refueling. As you have heard me say before, I was seeing growing interest in CNG vehicles from local fleet owners, company said no, that natural gas is about half the cost of gasoline or diesel and produces up to 30% fewer carbon emissions. At the same time, like most states, Oregon has little in the way of refueling infrastructure. We hope this proposal will be the first step in addressing that challenge and allowing local companies to take advantage of low cost natural gas for transportation. In the months ahead our team will be working through the regulatory process with the OPUC and customer advocates and we will keep you posted.…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Michael Bates with D. A. Davidson. Michael Bates – DA Davidson: Hi. Good morning, guys. Couple of my questions for you. Earlier in your prepared remarks you mentioned that you are working with some lumber companies considering conversion to natural gas. Can you give us little bit of commentary around that? How the timing might work around those conversions and potential impact on utilities earnings?

I really I can’t, I think it’s important to know these are our financial decisions that these industrial customers are going to make. And we are never sure for certain that actually convert. I would say again our industrial – we don’t have large margins on the industrial side and probably one of the most important science of industrial growth really is the repel of that they have for us when you talk about hiring people who are building houses and buying houses and the housing market for us and the commercial repel effect of these industrial loads is really important to our bottom line. But it really at this point difficult for me to tell you any given timing or any given financial impact on the bottom line for us. Michael Bates – DA Davidson: All right. Understood. Also O&M take downward relative to the last year. Can you give us a little more color on, what the change was and how sustainable that shift might be going forward?

Again Steve. The largest contributor that decline this quarter was a lower bad debt expense, we have been – we have adjusted our reserve because our collection rate has been very positive we’ve been trending downward for a while now and it’s really appears to be sustained improvement in the reserve balance. So we actually took an adjustment downwards so didn’t benefited O&M expenses, but I would say that, we did see a slight uptick in O&M expenses, but very minimal, because our employ counts are up slightly over the last year, and since our pay role up a little bit as well as benefit cost – related benefit cost, but generally speaking O&M seems to be in that 1% to 2% range. Right now, it’s down 2%, but I think that was largely during the side of bad debt expense adjustment. Michael Bates – DA Davidson: All right. And my final question, you’ve laid out these four issues that are currently being reviewed by the commission in Oregon you said that you expect them to be results either this year or early next year. Can you give us some color on – is there any way you would know which of these issues would be first priority for the commission – the order – it was we would get a resolution?

I can give you a little bit of color on it. Taking off more than the working gas inventory account balances, we just filed our testimony I think within the last couple of days actually on that one, so it’s just getting started. I’m somewhat optimistic about that one, I’m not sure that’s going to take terribly long, but it could go through most of the remaining parts of the summer, into the fall, that kind of thing. The prepaid pension, which is an important one for us is probably the most complicated. It involves other utilities, all the other utilities in Oregon, and I think that’s the one that’s likely to take the longest. We’re briefing for example, whether pieces of it will be separated into parallel processes or separate sequential processes, it’s just looking like that one as the one that could take late into the year or early into next year. The discussion about interstate storage revenue sharing, we had some even started yet. So I think that one is kind of again late in the year. And then the one that’s probably the farthest along is the site remediation and recovering mechanism, the earnings test issue. Thoroughly to tell where that ends up, but I would say I think that’s probably the one that will potentially come out first, maybe late summer, early fall, that kind of thing. Michael Bates – DA Davidson: Thank you very much.

No other questions here. I know we’re going to see a lot of you at the financial forum next week. We hope to see and take your questions then as well, and travel safely everyone. So unless there is any other questions, we’ll close it off.

I show no other questions, so this concludes today’s conference. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.