Christopher T. Forsythe
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Atmos Energy
Thank you, Dan, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us and your interest in Atmos Energy. Yesterday, we announced fiscal year-to-date diluted earnings per share of $6.00 compared to $5.33 per diluted share in the prior year period. Our third quarter and fiscal year-to-date results continue to be driven by two themes, regulatory outcomes reflecting increased safety and reliability spending and customer growth. Additionally, strong through-system revenues of APT, particularly during the third fiscal quarter contributed to our performance.
Regulatory outcomes in both of our segments increased operating income by $238 million and residential customer growth and rising industrial load in our distribution segment increased operating income by an additional $18 million. Revenues in our Pipeline & Storage segment increased $19 million period-over-period, $11 million of this amount [Indecipherable] mechanism was realized during our third fiscal quarter. Several of the pipelines coming out of Permian experienced planned and unplanned maintenance. This reduction in takeaway capacity, coupled with robust associated natural gas production, widened spreads between the Waha Header on the western end of APT system and delivered points in the Eastern and southern ends of the system. We expect spreads to remain elevated through the end of our fiscal year.
Excluding the $14 million one-time bad debt adjust -- bad debt adjustment we reported in Mississippi in the first quarter, consolidated O&M increased a net $16 million or about 3%. This increase is primarily due to higher import related costs, insurance premiums, IT software and maintenance costs, partially offset by a $15 million decrease in O&M in our Pipeline & Storage segment, primarily due to the timing of in line inspection work. As expected, O&M in the third fiscal quarter trended higher than the prior year quarter, and we anticipate O&M spending in the fourth fiscal quarter to trend higher as well as we continue to focus our spending on compliance, maintenance and system monitoring. We still expect fiscal '24 O&M to be in the range of $800 million to $820 million.
Consolidated capital spending increased to $2.1 billion, with 80% plus dedicated to improving the safety and reliability of our system. Spending in our distribution segment has increased due to higher safety and reliability spending and higher spending to support customer growth. Spending in our pipeline and storage segment is lower than the prior year due to timing. We remain on-track to spend approximately $3.1 billion this fiscal year.
Since the end of our second fiscal quarter, we implemented about $213 million in annualized regulatory outcomes, including all of this year's Texas GRIP filings and our annual filings with the City of Dallas, Louisiana and Tennessee. Year-to-date, we have completed $380 million in annualized regulatory outcomes. Currently, we have an additional $182 million in annualized outcomes in progress. Additionally, we made our first filing under APT's new System Safety and Integrity mechanism seeking a $19 million increase in revenues. This new mechanism was approved in APT's last year rate case as a floating mechanism for costs incurred to address new federal and safety-related regulations, meaning we will recognize the revenue and related O&M cost after reviewing approval by the Texas Federal Commission, resulting in no impact to operating income.
Our financial position continues to remain strong. We finished our third fiscal quarter with an equity capitalization of 61% and approximately $4.3 billion in liquidity. This amount includes $551 million of net proceeds available under existing forward sale agreements that will fully satisfy our anticipated fiscal '24 equity needs and most are anticipated fiscal '25 needs. In June, we completed a $325 million senior unsecured debt offering, tapping our existing 10-year 5.9% senior notes. As a result, our overall weighted average cost of debt as of June 30 stands at 4.1% and our debt profile remains very manageable with the weighted average maturity of approximately 17 years.
As we head into the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, we now believe our fiscal '24 earnings per share guidance will be at the higher end of our reaffirmed earnings per share guidance range of $6.70 to $6.80. Our anticipated financing plan for fiscal '24 is complete. All regulatory outcomes that can impact fiscal '24 have been implemented. As I mentioned ago, we anticipate spreads for APT's through-system business will remain elevated, which remain -- which will modestly contribute to our Q4 results and we have a reasonably clear line of sight into the system compliance, maintenance and monitoring we were performing in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, our guidance range includes two items totaling $0.17, that will exclude when we initiate our fiscal '25 guidance in November. The first item is the Texas property tax benefit that we've been discussing all fiscal year, which would favorably impact fiscal '24 results by $0.10. Additionally, the one-time Mississippi bad debt adjustment represented $0.7. We continue to anticipate 6% to 8% earnings per share growth from this adjusted EPS amount through fiscal '28.
Thank you for your time today. And I will turn the call over to Kevin for his update and some closing remarks. Kevin?
