Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Barry Klein - Citi
Barry Klein - Citi
Just wondering on the volumes, how did they come in this quarter versus last year by customer type, residential, industrial, so forth.
Jeff Shaw
I think if you look at page, generally speaking we’re seeing that we have several different factors that are affecting the margin right now. First of all you have a contraction in margin related to under using customers I guess I’ll call them for lack of a better term. Those would be where the average usage has declined for a variety of reasons.
You may have homes that are active but no body is in them, an investor has purchased them, you’re getting a basic service charge but you’re not seeing any usage per say for water, heating or other uses.
So we have that type and in the documents on page 15 in the 10-Q we talk about for the quarter and the six months ended that the estimated impact of these non weather related volumetric declines was a reduction in operating margin of $2 million for the second quarter and $8 million for the six months ended.
We expect to see a similar trend to the end of the year. If you take a look at our customer count it is net of inactive meters and we have inactive meters, an excess number of inactive meters today that has built over the last little while but seems to have been holding relatively steady.
That’s probably about 50,000 excess inactive customers. So at the time that this starts to turn around and we see some progress towards those customers hooking up, we should start to see customer numbers that would exceed first time meter sets. With no investment you’ll see customer numbers come back.
Its just a question of when is the timing of that turnaround. We’re watching for that. I don’t necessarily today I don’t think anyone in this room has an answer nor do I see anybody in our communities that can give us a firm answer as to when that might turn.
So hopefully that addresses your question.
Barry Klein - Citi
And with regard to the decoupling study in Arizona, you got all the company’s work separately and submit their, everything, I guess their proposals separately or are you trying to get together with the other utilities and submit something as sort of a unified front.
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