Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Francesca McCann - Stanford Financial.
Francesca McCann - Stanford Financial.
Good morning and congratulations on a good quarter and year. Looking forward to more. A quick question on the purchase of water costs and the increase there, if you can detail that out a little bit more and then also tell us what you see there moving forward, trend wise, what we can expect?
Martin Kropelnicki
That’s actually a very good question and when we haven’t been in our blackout period, I’ve actually gotten quite a few calls about this issue, because some of the other issues that are popping up with other water companies within the state then have add some issues this year.
The 10-K will be filed hopefully today or sometime tomorrow, and in the 10-K on page 35, we break out our water production. And really, when you look at this issue and how it works, I think there is a couple of things that are really important when looking at us versus other companies.
First and foremost, mix matters. In total, the company produced approximately 141 billion gallons of water during the year. Of that amount, approximately 50% was purchased water from wholesalers, and the other 50% came from our own wells and surface water.
When you look at the 50% that’s ours, the majority of that comes from our own wells. Approximately 46.4%; only about 3.7% of the surface water, came from our surface water plants of which we had four, and that was just down slightly.
In total of the $141 billion of water produced, $5 billion came from our surface sources, and that was down slightly from $5.6 billion the year before. So, as the reservoirs have had lower water levels, etcetera, that has affected our ability to run the plant. But in terms of it being a material part of our overall portfolio, it is really not.
The second thing is, given the fact that we have the largest number of districts in the state of California, I think we have gotten better at rate making around these issues and as you may recall in our rate making process, every year we’ve had 8 districts come in for rates, and we file our rate case for each of those 8 districts every year. That has allowed us to address the mix issue every year in districts that change. So I think we have gotten fairly sophisticated at our estimates in terms of how we look at the total demand.
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