Revisiting one of NOPE's early themes against a proposed civilian town inside NWS Earle

By no means do we bring up this telling 2009 report from North County Times on crimes inside Camp Pendleton (Oceanside, CA) to disparage our military or to suggest this is comparable in any way to how military bases such as NWS Earle, etc. inside New Jersey operate from day to day.

To the contrary, we merely present it as an anecdote to one of NOPE's original objections to the Department of Navy's EIS-stated plan to provide unimpeded civilian access and housing to the Laurelwood complex at NWS Earle and how, functionally, opening the development to 300 new civilian families would have been the equivalent of running a small town inside an extremely secure Naval Weapons Station.

One of the notions lost on people who misguidedly charged NOPE as some kind of anti-affordable housing or anti-veterans contingent was that 24-hour policing of a civilian town inside a weapons facility, even to the layperson with no experience in military matters or law enforcement could easily see, would have been no easy task on Earle's commander and could clearly have compromised base force protection.

This is merely one reason why NOPE applauds the DoN's decision to buy out the Laurelwood contract, an outcome we eagerly anticipate and will keep supporters posted on in the days ahead.