This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

All the bragging and preening that comes out of Utah's claim to be the "best managed state" in the Union comes to a drunken crash for anyone who is at all interested in purchasing liquor, wine or full-strength beer at one of the state-owned stores.

Or unlucky enough to be working in one.

Now comes word that the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is planning to use the $3 million budget boost it received from the last session of the Legislature to make some long-overdue improvements. They include hiring more managers and clerks and increasing their pay.

The list of improvements also includes a plan to retain a full-time public information officer to deal with the large and growing number of inquiries for information.

Better pay for a larger staff should do at least a little to improve customer service at the monopolistic chain. Generally, those stores are small, poorly stocked, not very clean, overseen by overstretched managers and run day-to-day by staff that is underpaid and often devoid of the basic knowledge of the product they are selling.

Whether the public information officer also improves the management and operations of the agency will depend on just how whoever is hired for the post — to pay as much as $84,000 a year, plus benefits — chooses to handle his or her portfolio. And whether DABC's top brass understands what a good PR person is for.

Fear among the agency's many critics, of course, is that the whole purpose of the state's new liquor flack will be to put a rosy sheen on everything the DABC does or doesn't do. To give the agency an undeserved reputation among both members of the public (who shop in liquor stores) and members of the state's ruling class (who don't).

But a really good PR pro is like a really good lawyer. Either can come to your rescue after you've done something stupid. But the real value of both is to work with the client before something bad happens, to frankly, sometimes bluntly, apprise them of how their plans, or the accidents they fall into, are likely to harm them if the don't handle it the right way.

Generally, that means thinking through all ideas with an eye for how they will be received once they become public. For a lawyer, that means stopping a client from doing something that will get them dragged into court. For a PR person, it means stopping the boss from doing something that will look really, really awful on the front page of The Salt Lake Tribune.

Because it's a lot easier for a public agency to avoid doing stupid stuff than to clean up the mess afterward.