Progress whitewashes telco's wrong number.

• Author: Murray, Arthur O.
• Position: TAR HEEL TATTLER

Remember how Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into paying him to let them whitewash his aunt's fence? Tom got an apple, a kite, a dead rat and a string to swing it with, a key that didn't unlock anything, a kitten with one eye and several other treasures for allowing the boys to fulfill his obligation to Aunt Polly.

ITC^DeltaCom Inc. did Tom a whole lot better. The West Point, Ga.-based telecommunications provider collected $1.9 million from Progress Energy Inc. this summer for letting the power company negotiate a deal to put its name on what used to be the BTI Center for Performing Arts in Raleigh.

What did ITC^DeltaCom give up? A contract that obliged it to pay the city $500,000 to keep the name of a dead company through 2017 on the downtown complex of theaters and music halls. ITC^DeltaCom inherited the contract two years ago when it bought BTI Telecom Corp., its smaller Raleigh-based rival (Tar Heel Tattler, August 2003).

Six years earlier, big spender Peter Loftin, BTI founder and CEO, had agreed to pay the city $3.1 million--$250,000 a year for 10 years, plus $600,000 in telecommunications services--for 20-year naming rights. The merger had erased BTI as an entity, but the contract didn't allow ITC^DeltaCom to change the arts complex's name or sell the rights to it without city approval.

Neither ITC^DeltaCom nor Progress would...