Giving bottles of beer to journalists attending a recent U.S. Olympic Committee media conference was a mistake that won't happen again, the head of the Salt Lake Convention and Visitors Bureau said Friday.
"We made a mistake," Rick Davis, the chief executive officer of the bureau said. "We should not have included the beer. It was an inappropriate message."Inappropriate, Davis said, because of the reaction here at home. "It sent a message to our local community that this is the focus of our selling message. It is not."
In a memo to the bureau's board of trustees, Davis acknowledged their concern that "we were `playing up' the availability of alcohol and . . . that we were `playing down' the importance of the LDS Church to our community."
Some volunteers at the USOC Olympic Media Summit were advised to tell journalists that only 49 percent of Salt Lake residents are LDS, even though some 70 percent of all Utahns belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The 200 or so journalists in Salt Lake City for the USOC conference from Oct. 25-28 received two bottles of locally brewed beer in a goodie bag from the bureau, along with candy, a cookie, an apple and other treats.
According to one of the workers handing out the brown-paper bags, the beer was included to make sure the journalists, who were from as far away as Japan, would know they could get a drink in Utah.
Not so, said Davis, who has barred the unnamed worker from speaking to the media in the future and from giving out beer on behalf of the bureau in the future.
"I don't know that the message was to say alcohol is available," Davis said. "Rather it was to provide a sample of local products," something he said is routinely done in Salt Lake City and other convention destinations.
But alcohol won't be given out by the bureau in the future, he said. "It's a matter of hospitality. It's an industry standard in other cities. It's not a standard we'll use again in Salt Lake City."
Davis said providing alcohol to conventioneers became an issue because of articles and opinion columns that appeared in the Deseret News. Those led to concerns being raised by members of the bureau's board of trustees.
"I was unaware of the concern," Davis said. "I think it has escaped media attention in the past."
He heard about it from members of the bureau's board of trustees, who are likely to address the issue at their upcoming meetings. Davis said he hopes to put together a small group of board members to come up with a new policy.
The board's chairman-elect, Steve Romney, said he's not sure what their decision will be. He said he was unaware that alcohol had been distributed to conventioneers in the past.
"We don't want to do anything that will hurt support for the Olympics in the community. We didn't intend to this time," Romney, the head of a local consulting company said.
He said he was also concerned about the effect the news coverage would have on community support for the bureau, which he said brings in millions of dollars annually to the state.