If you live in Bellevue, PA, and want to do some grilling outside this summer, you’d better have a deep backyard, as a recently passed ordinance bans the use of grills within five feet of a house, porch or any other combustible material. Unhappy with the new rules, a few hundred people decided to have a wienie roast outside Bellevue Borough Hall yesterday.

“I want to promote the fact that even though people don’t agree with council’s actions we can express ourselves freely,” the mayor of Bellevue, who attempted to veto the law, tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “People are going to protest and hold them accountable.”

The Bellevue Council President tells the paper the ban is all about fire safety.

“It’s a shame that they don’t see the need for this particular ordinance,” she explains to the Post-Gazette. “We’ve had a number of near misses — one just two weeks ago that was a malfunction of the grill. Without this ordinance, if we see someone being negligent, we can’t do anything.”

The organizer of the “Grillabration” says the idea of the protest is to “have fun at the cost of council’s silly vendetta against grills.”

“This law is just a joke,” another Bellevue resident tells KDKA-TV. “We are all intelligent people. We know how to grill.”

But the Council president doesn’t like being called out in such a public shaming.

“Council has not been nasty to them and they don’t have to be nasty to council,” she said.

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