Operator
Operator
All right. Welcome to RGC Resources First Quarter Earnings Call. I am John D'Orazio, President and CEO of RGC Resources. Thank you for taking the time out of your morning to attend. Please mute your line and hold your questions until the completion of the presentation. Also the link to today’s presentation is available on our website at rgcresources.com on the Investor and Financial Information page. Before we begin, just a reminder on forward-looking statements as shown on Slide 1. Moving on to Slide 2 – could you please mute your line? Could you please mute your line, who's ever talking there. Thank you. All right. Let me repeat, so moving on to Slide 2, we plan to review key operational and financial highlights, our outlook for 2019 and take any questions. As shown on Slide 3, first quarter 2019 earnings per share are $0.30, which is a $0.02 or 7% improvement over first quarter of 2018. As Slide 4 highlights, we invested $5.7 million in our regulated utility in the first quarter, a 6% increase over the same period last year. We spent approximately $1.4 million on infrastructure replacement, $2.9 million on customer growth and $1.5 million on other capital needs. The quarter-to-quarter change was primarily due to elevated spending related to customer growth. We continue to experience steady group customer growth, as shown on Slide 5, we added 213 new customers in the first quarter. On Slide 6, our total volume increased 5% and our commercial and industrial volumes increased 4% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. We're on Slide 7. The MVP project was over 70% complete coming into January of 2019. The targeted in-service date is the end of 2019. We invested approximately $10 million in the MVP project in the first quarter. We anticipate investing a total of $23 million in fiscal 2019. The MVP Southgate Project which is a 70 mile, 24 and 16 inch pipeline was filed with FERC in November of 2018. MVP Southgate is projected to be in-service at the end of 2020. Now I'd like to introduce Paul Nester, our Chief Financial Officer, he will review our financial results.