The Bel Air Independence Day Committee has an established history of doing the right things, the right way, for the right reasons.
The committee's decision to kick the Bel Air Lions Club to the curb by snatching away the Fourth of July Pancake Breakfast and giving it to a booster club at Bel Air High School is shameful.
Here is, straight from its Web site, the Lions creed: "Lions are friends, family and neighbors who share a core belief: community is what we make it."
The Lions Club has done its fair share to make Bel Air a better place. For the past 21 years, one of those things it has done is serve the community's annual pancake breakfast.
When the Lions Club took over the pancake breakfast, it was served at Bel Air Middle School and about 300 people attended. Attendance doubled and, three years later, the breakfast was moved to the high school.
That's where it really flourished. Last year, the Lions Club served all-you-can-eat pancakes to 2,217 people.
What was the reward for the Lions Club? A reserved thank you, but we're giving your fundraising event to another group. That announcement came during a routine committee meeting about three weeks before this year's event, stunning the Lions Club and its members.
"It's like a rite of passage on July 4th," Harold Boccia, a Lions Club member and chairman of the pancake fundraiser committee, said. "Between 7 and 1l:30, people went to the pancake breakfast and then they went to the other events."
The Bel Air Independence Day Committee is an all-volunteer group serving its community as best as it sees fit. That sounds like the Bel Air Lions Club, doesn't it?
We're all for new groups getting involved with the Bel Air Fourth of July events. Change is the only way to keep such a celebration thriving.
What we're not in favor of is the Bel Air Lions Club having the event it help make bigger and more successful over the last two decades pulled right out from under it. The terse announcement of the change in the middle of a meeting just weeks shy of the Fourth of July makes a bad decision worse. The Bel Air Lions Club deserved better treatment from the Bel Air Independence Day Committee.
There has to be more to this matter than what the committee has said publicly. Otherwise, it's just foolishness that makes no sense.