All right. Well, good morning everyone, and welcome to day two of the conference. For those who were here yesterday, thank you. Hope today went well. For those who were not here, just from a format standpoint, you're going to hear presentations from the companies up here, and then we'll do Q&A across the panel at the end. We'd 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. Our 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?
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 way, shape, or form. 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. Let me turn it over to Bill to get us going. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Steve. I thought we would first begin with our cautionary statement, ask you to take a look at that. I thought we would begin with a review of Hurricane Harvey. 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 call centers. We've had 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.
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. That was a result of having to change customer service from one substation to another as 16 substations got flooded. That's 16 substations out of just over 200 substations. 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 through the flood. This slide, I'm just going to speak to the investments that we've made and how they helped in service of our customers in restoring power.
We are completely AMI, 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 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, email, or call. That's very reassuring if you're a customer. 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, never to that extent. For us, the impact financially on Hurricane Harvey will be modest. We did have milder weather during the two weeks around Hurricane Harvey. Our incremental O&M costs associated with the storm will be capitalized in a regulatory asset for future recovery. 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. At the end of the day, you will not see any meaningful impact from Hurricane Harvey on our financial statements. More of our costs were operating than they were actually property. This is a little bit Talking Texas slide, just to 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.
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 has our national economy growing. As we've spoken about in our various earnings calls, there has not been one 12-month period when we had residential meter count growth at less than 2% in the last three years. During any rolling 12-month period, the residential meter count growth rate has been somewhere between 2% and 2.5%. 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 Hurricane Harvey on the longer-term growth rate in Houston or other areas of Texas. I'll now quickly review the utilities. In the electric side of the business, we're very pleased with the legislative work this year in 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 1st for our 2017 DCRF filing. 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 million 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.
This is the Freeport LNG project, and the redundancies that are needed are both to serve that project as well as Dow Chemical's announced $5 billion expansion on their project. 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 and Texas Gulf, and it included opportunity for future GRIP filings as well as a revenue requirement. 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, that begs for general rate case filing. We are fortunate in Minnesota in 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. We have interim rates. We put interim rates in place, and we'll begin collecting those revenues on October 1st. 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. That is working well. Next two slides, we've labeled them Disclosed Utility Operations Net Income Drivers for 2018. 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. It's repackaged to show the net income impacts, and it is only that which has been disclosed to date. It does not include any forward-looking rate cases. You can find those on our investor relations website. Specifically, they're with the fourth quarter call materials. It only includes where we've been awarded rates or have had new filings. That's the electric side. The gas side is the same.
I'm just going to point out two items in here which were one-time 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 a regulatory asset for future recovery for those costs. With that, had a contra expense account, and that is $10 million 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 were successful, if you will, in the litigation in that we reduced our property taxes. That also went through the income statement, and that is $7 million, one-time item in 2017.
To get a better picture of what the run rate might look like for gas, you would want to back out those two items. Having said all of that, as we speak to our growth rate in EPS off of 2017, we are not going to be reversing those items. Whatever our EPS is for this year, we would expect to earn at the high end of that 4%-6% that I talked about earlier. 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. In 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.
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. It's working well for us. We would expect a stairstep 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 nearly 20 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. As currently disclosed, if you were to take a net income number, you would get $12 million. We will 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. The net present value of all that stays the same through the end of the life of those transition bonds. I think with that, I'll leave you with a few reasons to consider investing in CenterPoint Common. It's David's turn to talk about what's going on north and west of Houston and south of Houston.
Thank you, Bill.