When you look around Bel Air, all you see are government buildings, restaurants by the dozen, lawyers by the hundreds, fields upon fields of houses, and the largest indoor mall in the county.

Featured Web Site Bel Air Community Band This 70-piece band performs a variety of music throughout Harford County and neighboring states year around.

What the town does not have is a Bulle Rock, a Ripken stadium, a feeling of haute, or an extended waterfront on the Chesapeake Bay. It is a town for the moment, or as long as taxes keep going up. Which makes us believe that this town is in the advanced stages of missing the boat.

Maybe Harford Community College can help out here. Bel Air would do well to cosy up to HCC. The Amoss Center of Performing Arts is just one reason why. After all, a little imported haute is better than no haute at all. And the college has a bigger budget than the town.

There may be a potential trade up here. The college needs help in governing, as was amply demonstrated by a broad range of confiscatory traffic fines that were imposed in one of several recent administration snits. And Bel Air needs cultural and identity help, like the Performing Arts Center, the new research library, a real telescope and planetarium, and, oh yes, identification with a center for learning, always a "visionary" thing to do.

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With the area running out of room and growth slowing, there is a sense of turning away from the county seat and back toward Aberdeen. Unless Bel Air gets its own reason for being, in another generation it will be a county seat again. And that was never enough by itself.

DM