Louisiana Weekly

By Michael Patrick Welch Contributing Writer Ingenuity and persistence can change your life. This has recently proven true in the case of New Orleans native and Algiers resident Shelley Thomas, 72, who has created and self-marketed an invention called the ECO Wonder Cloth. “All I wanted to do was clean my floors without interruption,” said Shelley. “So at 72, I became a business woman.” The ECO Wonder Cloth is essentially a floor cleaning cloth made of reusable microfiber – a cloth appendage you wrap around the head of a Swiffer floor sweeper, instead of Swiffer’s dis- posable white tissues. “I specially designed the ECO Wonder Cloth to fit around the Swiffer’s mop head,” explained Thomas. Whereas the traditional Swiffer tissues are held onto the Swiffer’s head via holes into which the tissues are tucked, and the tis- sues can often come loose while you mop, the ECO Wonder Cloth remains locked in place around the mop head by velcro strips. “When one side of the Wonder Cloth gets dirty, you just undo the velcro and take it off and reverse it. Or when both sides get dirty you can just rinse the whole thing off with water, or throw it in the wash- ing machine,” said Thomas of her invention, which is made for both wet mopping or dry mopping, making it perfect for use on the types of hardwood floors found in so many New Orleans homes. “And you get hundreds of uses out of just one,” Thomas boasted, “So you save money not buying the disposable Swiffer sheets. Plus, you’re not filling up the landfill so it’s better for the envi- ronment.” Hence the “ECO” part. Despite the seeming simplicity of Thomas’s invention, the road to its creation proved a bit chal- lenging, especially once Thomas realized she would have to do everything herself. “It was tough to just get it patented,” she recalled. “I had a lawyer but he wasn’t wording the pitch the way I wanted it, and so I kept getting rejections for the patent. So I decided to write it up myself and eventually I success- fully got the patent.” Once she’d patented her invention, Thomas then had to find the right company to manu- facture the ECO Wonder Cloth. “I wanted it to be made of microfiber,” she explained, “but in the process of researching how to manufacture the ECO Wonder Cloth, I found out that micro-fiber is only made in China.” She went through several manufac- turers before finding an overseas company called Topeco Cleo that could satisfactorily make her idea a reality. Thomas and her invention and her story were recently featured on WGNO’s 6 p.m. news, and online pre-orders are going well, with the help of social media. For now, Thomas sells her invention via her website (ecowonder- cloth.com ) for $19.95 a piece, or two for $14.99. Formerly a consultant and instructor in business with a focus on IT work, Thomas can now, at the age of 72, count inventor and entrepreneur among her titles.◊ Page 9 THE LOUISIANA WEEKLY - YOUR MULTICULTURAL MEDIUM December 25 - December 31 , 2023 Northeast Louisiana gets first power bill hike in 40 years Local resident proves mopping up can be a rewarding experience SHELLY THOMAS By Wesley Muller Contributing Writer (lailluminator.com) — Residents in northeast Louisiana will soon pay more for electricity after state utility regulators earlier this month approved an immediate 12 percent rate increase for the Northeast Louisiana Power Cooperative – its first such increase in 40 years. The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 4-1 in favor of NELPCO’s application for an interim 12 percent base rate increase. Commissioner Davanté Lewis, D-Baton Rouge, cast the only dissenting vote, saying he wanted more time to review the request. “Rates are very serious to me,” Lewis said, “and this is a signifi- cant increase when you talk about poverty in the state.” NELPCO provides electricity to nearly 12,000 rural members across seven parishes, including some of the poorest in the state along the Mississippi delta. While standard rate increase applications typically take six months to a year for approval before the commission, NELPCO requested immediate approval on an interim basis while the LPSC takes time to fully review and con- sider the application. If the LPSC, upon further review, later denies or lowers the increase, the utility will have to reimburse its members. The 12 percent increase adds an estimated one-cent per kilowatt- hour charge to the average resi- dential customer’s monthly bill or roughly an additional $17. NELPCO typically provides some of the lowest rates for elec- tricity in Louisiana and will con- tinue to rank among the lowest even with the increase, the co- op’s executives said. NELPCO has not raised its base rate since 1984. General Manager Jeff Churchwell told commission- ers the co-op had no other options but to ask for this increase. “We are currently at a negative rate of return…We’ve gotten to the point [where] we’re tapped out,” he said. In July, the utility discovered it was in a precarious financial posi- tion after it completed a years long cost-for-service study. It found the organization had only about three days worth of cash reserves on hand as of Sept. 30, 2022. Churchwell said the co-op has been hit particularly hard by the supply chain crisis and rising interest rates. It has been forced to rely on expensive lines of credit. Unlike investor-owned utility companies such as Entergy and Cleco, rural electricity coopera- tives generate revenue only for the purpose of delivering utility services to their members, not to make a profit or pay dividends to shareholders. When pressed on whether the co- op would accept a partial rate hike, NELPCO attorney J. Kenton Parsons pleaded with the commis- sioners to approve the full ask of 12 percent, saying it is a “dire financial situation.” “We as a utility are coming in with not so much as our hands out but on our knees,” Parsons said. The new rate could appear on customer bills as soon as mid- January.◊ Mississippi River and its mayors step onto international climate stage, at COP28 By Keely Brewer C ontributing Writer (Special from The Daily Memphian via The Lens ) — One in 12 people globally con- sume commodities grown in the Mississippi River basin, by some estimates. More than 60 percent of grain in the U.S. moves along the waterway to reach interna- tional markets. So, climate impacts – particularly recent swings between droughts and floods – hit the river hard. “Over the past few years, (New Orleans) has seen increasingly stronger storms, and more recently, life-threatening heat waves and a prolonged drought that damaged our greenspace and contributed to a saltwater intrusion that threat- ened our drinking water,” said New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, part of a coalition of may- ors – called the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, or MRCTI – who attended the recent United Nations climate-change conference in Dubai. Using federal data on the damage costs of natural disasters, MRCTI reports a $246 billion loss through- out the Mississippi River basin in less than two decades. As mayors of cities set on the banks of the Mississippi, who are affected by climate troubles on the river, the mayors sought to repre- sent their interests on a world stage and discuss the best ways to adapt to climate change, in ways that protect their cities. Three other MRCTI Mississippi River mayors – Mitch Reynolds of LaCrosse, Wis.; Brad Cavanagh of Dubuque, Iowa; and Errick Simmons of Greenville, Miss.; – joined Cantrell at the conference. Surrounded by international lead- ers, the four mayors announced a slate of new initiatives, including natural infrastructure projects to reduce disaster risks, signing an agreement with a river advocacy group in India and piloting a new regional insurance system to sup- port Mississippi River towns. The international convening was contentious this year and went into overtime after a disagreement over whether the U.N. should call for total fossil-fuel phaseout in the report that is issued at the end of the conference. The final interna- tional agreement slightly softened that stand, emphasizing the need to transition from fossil fuels. Yet some of the most important work happening at the gathering may be among the mayors’ coali- tion and other similar groups, said Reynolds, the mayor from LaCrosse, Wisconsin. “Our organization, like so many other subnational groups around the globe, is doing the hard work on the ground at home to adapt to climate change and build resilience so that real solu- tions can happen quickly,” Reynolds said in a statement. Cantrell also saw it as a group mission, saying that leaders need to “take collective, global action towards eliminating these risks and creating a safer, healthier environ- ment for our people.” The executive director of MRCTI, Colin Wellenkamp, said the group met with coalitions from other countries and dis- cussed how similar issues, like flooding, drought and extreme heat were playing out there, and how they could share knowledge. Wellenkamp said they had con- versations about the river basin with French President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mayors eyeing natural infrastructure, and seeking international designs Two of the projects MRCTI unveiled in Dubai are for infra- structure on the river. The first is an effort to make the lower river more resilient in the face of climate-related disasters. At the time of last year’s U.N. conference in Egypt, the coalition of mayors was working to secure $40 million for natural infrastruc- ture projects on the lower river to harden it against climate change. Environmental advocates have been lobbying for something like it for years, following suit with a decades-old counterpart in the upper basin, which has a much more robust system in place for restoration and research. They upped the lower-river proj- ect this year, and Wellenkamp said it’ll fund projects, such as expand- ing floodplains and restoring marshes, across 100,000 acres in states along the river. They’re aim- ing to complete the projects by the end of the decade and estimate it will cost $100 million. The other infrastructure project on MRCTI’s agenda – which pairs Mississippi River cities with world cities to help form resilience plans – is funded by a grant from the Netherlands hosted by the Resilient Cities Catalyst. Still in its early phases, the plan is to divide the river into three regions. Cities will apply to be one of 10 cities in each region to host global infra- structure firms. The goal is to start matching cities with firms by the end of next year and eventually cut disaster exposure by 25 percent. New insurance pilot The group also announced a new insurance pilot program that would provide payouts to cities and municipalities after disasters. Working with Munich Reinsurance Company, MRCTI is working to bring “reinsurance” to cities in the basin. It’s called “parametric” insur- ance, and it provides protection to policyholders against specific events by paying a set amount based on the magnitude of the event – a 100-year storm, for example – rather than the magni- tude of the losses. The goal is to create a private market-funded resilience fund for cities to deal with damage from things like flooding, without hav- ing to draw down on federal funds. Munich Reinsurance will leverage the ecosystem restoration projects run by Ducks Unlimited to create a risk pool whose environmental improvements will then be marke- tised to the reinsurance program. Spokesman John Lawson said the city of New Orleans is “excited by the prospect of the parametric insurance pilot program being developed between MRCTI and Munich Reinsurance.” Lawson said the pilot program details are still being finalized, “including the scope of coverage and the region of the Mississippi River it will cover.” They should be finalized by the end of October, he said. He said the city will continue to work with MRCTI and “look to potentially join the pilot program or a later full Mississippi River region program once those details are finalized.” Wellenkamp said because the system is a pilot that Munich Reinsurance hopes to scale, the details are proprietary at this time. “It’s unique,” he said. “No one else is doing anything like this.” Agreement with India MRCTI’s mayors also signed a memorandum of common purpose Continued on Page 11