D
#This is <UNK>.
The program that was referenced was really an effort across all the businesses and the corporate support areas to drive decision-making to a lower level, eliminate layers of management, increased spans of control, and make the decision-making really more efficient by having those fewer layers.
That was the focus.
We took a charge of about $70 million pretax, I think $43 million after-tax, and those labor costs will be recouped as the employees move on.
And so you will see a full year's benefit in 2017 and a partial benefit in 2016.
In terms of ongoing O&M, we are targeting a flat to CPI gross on O&M going forward.
It will probably be different year-by-year, and the only thing that would change on that of significance would be the outage period for Millstone where you might have two outages versus one in a given year.
But I look for us and for you to model flat CPI growth on O&M going forward.
Sales, weather normalized, for the quarter, were down about a little over 1%.
We have an annual expectation of a 1% positive sales growth for the year.
We still feel pretty good about that.
So that was a net for the first quarter.
April seems solid in supporting the 1% growth.
And we had ---+ we had actually pretty strong growth in all sectors but residential.
I would as always do on sales is when you are coming and comparing to a very significant weather season, we had a very strong first quarter of 2015 on weather and in late 2016, so the weather normalization process is not penny-accurate.
That's why we think 1% growth is still a good assumption for us.
Also, recall a 1% growth year-over-year, it only equates to about $0.04 or $0.05 a share for us.
This is <UNK>.
I don't think you should think about additional programs going forward.
We took a one-time charge, as we always do.
It's a nonrecurring event, and disclose that.
And we showed on our breakdown on Slide 8 that we would expect to see lower operating expenses and labor due to lower staffing levels of about $0.02 this year for the last six months of the year.
And I would expect us to see probably $0.04 or $0.05 next year, which is supportive of the growth rate that we have out there.
Thank you.
Thanks <UNK>.
