All right. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to day two of the conference. For those who were not here yes who were here yesterday, thank you. Hope the day went well. And for those who are not here, just from a format standpoint, you're going to hear presentations from both from the companies up here and then we'll do Q and A across the panel at the end and would love to get your questions and discussions.
So please be ready and get them going. It makes the conference better if we hear from you. So, first panel today is Talking Texas and this is a repeat because we did the same one last year. I wore my Texas tie, very important. If you guys don't have one, you should get one, at least in support for Texas, right?
So but we've got a lot going on in the state, a lot of interesting investment opportunities and obviously one of the few states that's actually growing significantly in all ways, shape or form. And so we've got today, first will be CenterPoint. We've got Bill Rogers, who's the CFO. And then InfraREIT, we've got David Campbell, who's the President and CEO. So let me turn it over to Bill to get us going.
Thanks.
Thank you very much, Steve. And I thought we would I'll first, again, with our cautionary statement, ask you to take a look at that. But I thought we would begin with a review of Hurricane Harvey. And to do that, we'll begin with a quick video. Which may or may not come with volume.
These are many of the pictures that you saw from the various news agencies during the coverage. In summary, for Houston and for Beaumont and Port Arthur, it was a flood event and very significant. We had on average 55 inches of rain over four days, which is how much rain we get in the course of a year in Houston. There's one of our alcohol centers. We have about 100,000 to 150,000 residential premises that have been flooded in the city and as many as 500,000 cars that were flooded.
So those cars will be taken in and moved all over the nation. I would encourage you if you're going to buy a used car, check out the VIN number. For CenterPoint, as you're looking at these floodwaters, we did have 950,000 total outages, but that was a result of having to change customer service from one substation to another as 16 substations got flooded. So that's 16 substations out of just over 200 substations. And at the end of any given day, we may have had 60,000 customers that were out of power for that day and that was a result of either their premise being flooded or we could not get to them to the flood.
This slide, I'm just going to speak to the investments that we've made and how they helped service our customers in restoring power. I'll begin with we are completely AMI, so we know exactly where the outages are through telecommunications from the meters or step down transformers. Second, our investment in intelligent grid allowed us to reroute power very quickly from one substation to another or from yes, from a substation to another substation as customers were about to lose power from a substation outage. Third, because we have the interconnection of our operational technology, which is the smart meters that I just talked about, intelligent grid to our customer information systems, we were able to notify customers that they were out of power through text, e mail or calls. So that's very reassuring if you're a customer.
And then finally, in the way of technologies, we had 13 drones in the air surveying our distribution system to determine which substations were underwater and how much they were underwater, how we could get access and had we lost any distribution lines. We have been using drone technology at CenterPoint, but never to that extent. For us, the impact financially on Harvey will be modest. We did have milder weather during the two weeks around Hurricane Harvey. Our incremental O and M costs associated with the storm will be capitalized in a regulatory asset for future recovery.
And our property costs will be either recovered through our insurance program where we have flood insurance or through our regular mechanisms to recover for assets. So at the end of the day, you will not see any meaningful impact from Harvey on our financial statements. And more of our costs were operating than they were actually property. This is a little bit talking Texas slide, just remind you of where we are in Texas. On the left hand slide, as you're looking at it, is our electric service territory, so it's the Houston MSA.
And on the right hand side is our various gas service territories. We're very pleased with the growth of our economy in Texas and Houston. I'm sure David will talk about more of that in his service territories. I think the number that I would call out for you is that our Chamber of Commerce in their economic research has the GDP growth rate growing out to 2040 at 3.3%. That's at least 50% greater than the U.
S. Chamber of Commerce as our national economy growing. And as we've spoken about in our various earnings calls, there has not been one twelve month period when we had residential meter count growth at less than 2% in the last three years. During any rolling twelve month period, the residential meter count growth rate has been somewhere between 22.5%. So we're very pleased and privileged to be able to serve this economy.
I have not read nor am I aware of anything being published about the impacts of Harvey on the longer term growth rate in Houston or other areas of Texas. I'll now quickly review the utilities. And in the electric side of the business, we're very pleased with legislative work this year and that we no longer have a limit on the distribution cost recovery factor filing. Recently, we received an order which will go into place in rates on October 1 for our 2017 DCRF filing. And then finally, last statement in there speaks to our growth and our capital investment.
This is not currently in our disclosed capital, but we are expecting to be building approximately $250,000,000 transmission investments for redundancies in the Freeport, Texas area. If you're not familiar with Freeport, maybe you're a little bit more familiar with Lake Jackson, but this is the Freeport LNG project and the redundancies that are needed are both to serve that project as well as Dow Chemicals announced $5,000,000,000 expansion on their project. So the industrial investment continues on The Gulf, and we will need to put redundancies in our transmission system to serve that. In this particular case, we are using existing property, either land or rights of way or substation to build out the transmission capacity down there in the Freeport and Lake Jackson area. On the gas side, we continue to see 1% customer growth, which means that volume sales growth remains positive on a year on year basis.
We are seeing some decline in use per customer, but not as great as the customer growth itself. We had a good rate case outcome this year in Texas, in Texas Gulf, and it included opportunity for future GRIP filings as well as a revenue requirement. And with the settlement, we had certain one time adjustments, which I'll address shortly. Our most recent rate case filing is in Minnesota. We're on a course really of filing those every other year.
We do not have any capital recovery mechanisms in place in Minnesota, so that begs for general rate case filing. We are fortunate in Minnesota and that we have a partial forward looking test year or as I like to say, a hybrid test year for known and measurable items one year out. And we have interim rates. So we put interim rates in place and we'll begin collecting those revenues on October 1. Final comment on Minnesota is that it's a state where we enjoy decoupling.
Last comment there is the Arkansas Public Service Commission. This is the first year that we filed and were awarded revenues under the formula rate plan. So that is working well. Next two slides, we've labeled them disclosed utility operations net income drivers for 2018. So what I'm sharing with you is everything that we have previously disclosed in investor presentations over the course of calls or just put in the public domain, it's just repackaged differently.
So it's repackaged to show the net income impacts and it is only that which has been disclosed today. So it does not to date, it does not include any forward looking rate cases. You can find those on our Investor Relations website, specifically there with the fourth quarter call materials. And it only includes where we've been awarded rates or have had new filings. So that's the electric side.
The gas side is the same. I'm just going to point out two items in here, which were onetime items in 2017. The first item is during the rate case in Texas, we were awarded recovery of our retiree health and welfare benefits, which we had not previously been capitalizing for future recovery. As a result of that settlement, we capitalized the regulatory asset for future recovery for those costs. And with that, I had a contra expense account and that is $10,000,000 on a net income basis.
The second item is litigation with the state of Minnesota with respect to our property taxes. We do this regularly, so there's nothing new here. But we did we were successful, if you will, in the litigation and that we reduced our property taxes. And so that also went through the income statement and that is $7,000,000 onetime item in 2017. So to get a better picture of what the run rate might look like for gas, you would want to back out those two items.
But having said all of that, as we speak to our growth rate and EPS off of 2017, we are not going to be reversing those items. So whatever our EPS is for this year, we would expect to earn at the high end of that 4% to 6% that I talked about earlier. And then finally, the other areas away from our gas and electric utilities and excluding our investment in Enable, We made an acquisition of an energy services company earlier this year. It's Atmos Energy Marketing. That is going well.
And our integration of that, we are recognizing the ability to improve margin and we are adding customers on a net basis relative to the companies that we have acquired. And in some cases, we've recognized that we didn't have margin on customers, so we're no longer doing business with them under those contracts. So it's working well for us. So we would expect a stair step increase in net income contribution from our energy services. Our equity return, which is the equity we would have earned on assets that we sold, meaning power plant assets, twenty years ago.
That is expected to go up next year. We will be working with the commission to smooth that out over the remaining life of that equity return, which goes out to 2024. So as currently disclosed, if you were to take a net income number, you would get $12,000,000 We'll be working with the commission to see if we might smooth that out in future years. The reason it gets lumpy is because the growth rate has been so great in Houston, we've been collecting more than forecasted. But the net present value of all that stays the same through the end of the life of those transition bonds.
And I think with that, I'll leave you with a few reasons to consider investing in CenterPoint Common. And it's David's turn to talk about what's going on North and West Of Houston and South Of Houston. Thank you, Bill.