GONZALES, La. Dan Ahern has stepped down as president of Eatel Corporation and will be replaced by a member of the family that owns the Gonzales-based telecommunications company.

Ahern had been president since 1999. He will be replaced by John Scanlan, who has been active in the company’s operations over the last few years.

Ahern was hired in 1996 as Eatel’s vice president of sales and marketing. Eatel spokeswoman Lisa Froman says Ahern didn’t indicate whether he was leaving his current post for personal or professional reasons. But, she says he’s been traveling a lot recently to his home in California so his decision last week to resign was not unexpected.

Froman says the change doesn’t represent any new direction for the company, which employs more than 500 people and provides Internet, local and long-distance service, Web hosting and development and telephone directory advertising to residents in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, New Orleans and our home territory of Ascension and Livingston parishes.

The company is privately held by the Scanlan family of Gonzales. It expanded service last year into the Mississippi Gulf Coast counties of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson, offering local and long-distance phone and dial-up Internet services.

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Eatel Corp., a one-time small local telephone company that has been expanding rapidly, said Thursday that it has stopped aggressively marketing itself as a local service alternative to BellSouth Corp.

The action, which resulted in the layoffs of 35 of the 574 employees of Gonzalez-based Eatel, was taken because of uncertainty dealing with the «Baby Bells» — such as BellSouth — providing access to their local networks, said Eatel President Dan Ahern.

Ahern said the company would continue to accept orders for its basic telephone service and would continue to service the 50,000 subscribers it had signed up, mostly in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette — along with its traditional base of customers in Ascension and Livingston parishes.

«We’re just not going to continue spending the money on advertising and telemarketing that we have in the past,» Ahern said. «We really regret the industry uncertainty caused us to take these actions.»

The local Bells have mounted a court challenge to federal rules on local access charges that competing local phone services pay to use Bell networks for competing local service.

Determined to fuel competition, the Federal Communications Commission forced the Baby Bells to lease their local phone lines at low rates to rivals. The local Bells were forced to show they had sufficiently opened their networks to competition before they were allowed to sell long-distance service — such as BellSouth now does in Louisiana.

The regional Bells claim the FCC rules are hampering investment in building more bandwidth-rich networks, including stringing fiber optics to homes.

«We’re going to sit back and wait until the dust settles, taking care of our existing accounts and take orders from our clients,» Ahern said.

Ahern said the laid-off employees were involved in marketing, sales and processing orders. Privately held Eatel’s services also include long distance, wireless, Internet and directory listings.