Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for standing by and welcome you to the First Quarter Earnings Conference. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Ed Christian, President and CEO of Saga Communications.

Thank you very much, Amanda. Sam will be here momentarily. And Sam, you know that we've been listening too long when we can actually hum the hold music. I mean, did you ever think about that?

We've been doing this quite a while, and --.

Do you want me to sing a few parts of the on-hold music that we get? The -- well, copyrighted AT&T music. Okay, go ahead, Sam.

Thanks. Thank you, Ed. This call will contain forward-looking statements about our future performance and results of operations that involve risks and uncertainties that are described in the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-K. This call will also contain a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation for all the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is attached in the selected financial data table. During the quarter, gross political revenue was down $1.3 million, which not so coincidently compares to a net revenue decrease of $1.3 million, certainly not tied together dollar for dollar but pretty close. Gross political revenue for the quarter was $43,000 compared to $1.3 million for the first quarter last year. All but $62,000 of political revenue last year was radio. All of this year's first quarter political revenue was radio. Without political, gross revenue for the first quarter would have been down 0.8%. Station operating expense increased 1.5%, with almost all of the increase being a result of health care costs. Without health care, station operating expense would have been down almost 1%. A couple of other areas of expense also impacted our overall station operating expenses. We had a significant increase in music licensing fees as well as a nice reduction in our station ratings expenses. Taking all three of these areas into account, our station operating expense would have been down 0.4%. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we did close on the acquisition of another radio station in Charlottesville, Virginia. We began operating this station under WUVA on February 1. While WCVL-FM C-Ville Country is not material to our numbers for the quarter, it will add a lot to our Charlottesville cluster over time. We purchased the station for $1,650,000. National accounted for approximately…

I want to just kind of speak on a couple things that you touched on. One is we really got whacked on insurance. We are self-insured, have been for decades. And we play the odds, and that's -- and it usually comes in anywhere from savings of being fully insured to self-insured. It's $1 million, $2 million a year, somewhere in there, which is our push between the full insurance. And in the first quarter, we had three people who hit the stop-loss, which is totally unusual for us. We can usually go a year with three people hitting a stop-loss. So that's where we took a bit of a whack. And that was hundreds of thousands of dollars in -- that we didn't see coming. The other is Global Music Rights, a new performing arts organization which we are operating, as the rest of the industry is operating, under an interim license through September. My other day job is the radio music license committee. And we will be commencing discussions I'm sure with them in the future, but that was an unexpected expense for every broadcaster in the United States that had to face that. So those were really the two efforts of class that we had which kind of showed. And there was no way we could plan for either one of them. No, it's not that we weren't doing our job on that. Let me talk a little bit about the -- our stations markets, the economy, everything else like that. Back in January, actually the 1st of January, I sent a letter, an e-mail, to all of our general managers and said, Happy New Year. Or is it? The text discussed my feelings on the upcoming Q1. And I told everyone that I couldn't call it.…

I'm not sure anybody does, but just stay in the picture.

I really don't. I mean it's -- I mean that's my memory of it. This poses a question on quantum superposition when it ends, and reality collapses in one possibility or the other. That was Q1 for me. Candidly down 0.8% on revenue without political is about as good as we could get it. And this took a lot of effort from our managers, sales managers and talent and account executives. One thing that we did embrace is a strong emphasis on selling, advertising and marketing to the service economy. I strongly believe that this is the future in a lot of respects for our industry. Electricians, farmers, garage store companies, dentists, massage therapists, home improvement, lawn care, the list goes on infinitum: None of the services can be delivered by UPS to your front door. We've always had a large service economy, but sometimes we get seduced by the large nature of retailers and forget about our basics. Getting back to basics is what helped us to be flat, though there really aren't any bragging rights on being flat. Some other areas I just want to share. We've primarily operated Saga for the last three decades in four distinct quadrants. We like to do business in recession-resistant communities that have large universities; large state capitals, non-closable military bases or communities reclaim agriculture. We've built this company market by market. We never win on acquisition bids, as you might find that in your haste to buy quantity you also find some very strange remnants stuffed into your bag. However, Q1 presented some unusual problems. For example, we do business in Illinois, both in Champaign, the University of Illinois; and Springfield, which is a state capital. Never did we anticipate that Illinois could experience the possibility of having its bond debt…

No. We -- the questions we got were all pretty -- we're getting pretty good at this that we've been doing long enough that we're covering most of those now in the commentary.

All right, Amanda, I think we've wrapped it up at this time. So if you want to do your closing comments, it's back to you.

[Operator Instructions]