Earlier today, Pocono Review published an open letter to Honesdale Mayor Derek Williams asking him to release his Statements of Financial Interests directly, instead of forcing residents through Right-to-Know.

The letter ran through the legal stakes. This piece is about the company at the center of it — and why so much of what Canaltown does is hard to describe without the help of three or four different words.

A “group”, an “initiative”, a “gift”

Canaltown almost never calls itself an LLC out loud. It calls itself other things, and the other things shift depending on the room.

The 2020 River Reporter called it “the group.” The 2021 election profile of Williams’s mayoral run called it “the Canaltown initiative.” The company’s own About page calls itself “technically a business” and walks that back with the line that any economic framing should be taken “in the spirit of the gift.” On Facebook, where Canaltown maintains a 1,100-follower page, the listed category isn’t Business. It’s Community — the same designation Facebook uses for fan pages and shared-interest hubs. Williams once told a reporter, on the record, that “it’s sometimes difficult to pin down what Canaltown is.”

A group sounds like volunteers. An initiative sounds like a movement. A community sounds like a bulletin board. A spirit-of-the-gift sounds like a charity. None of those words is the word the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania uses for the entity, which is registered as a Domestic Limited Liability Company under 15 Pa.C.S. § 8821 and presumed by statute to be operating for profit.

The state filing also disagrees with the website on a second point. The “About” page presents Glover and Williams as the company’s two principals, side by side, with parallel bios. The state filing names one. Williams. Glover doesn’t appear on the certificate of organization, doesn’t appear in any of the twelve subsequent annual reports, and has no recorded role at the entity at all. To Pennsylvania, Canaltown has one owner. To Canaltown, Canaltown has two.

The slide between names isn’t a quirk. It’s load-bearing.

No price, no rate, no rate card

Open Canaltown’s website right now and look for a price.

Look for a services menu, a rate card, a “hire us” page, a portfolio with numbers attached, a list of clients, any description of what an engagement actually looks like.

You won’t find it. What you’ll find is Canaltown’s documented activities — cartography, “citizen planning reports” submitted to the borough, grant writing for borough projects (Williams’s own admission to the River Reporter in 2021), maps for unidentified clients, festivals, blog posts — none of which are presented with so much as a ballpark.

This is unusual at twelve years in. Black & Brass Coffee, two blocks down Main Street, posts what its beans cost. Hotel Wayne lists its room rates. Loose Leaf Pages prices its books. Real businesses tell you what they sell. Canaltown doesn’t, and the silence is consistent enough that it stops looking like an oversight.

A clearly-priced commercial practice creates legible obligations. List “grant writing services, $2,500 per application” on your website, and any borough payment to you becomes a vendor relationship — one that runs into § 1103(f) of Pennsylvania’s Ethics Act, which restricts public officials from contracting with their own governmental bodies. List “design services by Lisa Glover, available for booking,” and her work becomes a documented commercial arrangement with the mayor instead of an unstated creative partnership.

A business that won’t tell you what it sells is a business whose books can’t be checked against the conflicts they might contain.

The cover sheet test

This is a useful exercise. In 2020, Canaltown submitted a substantive zoning review to Honesdale Borough Council — pages of analysis on conditional-use parking, short-term rental siting, mixed-use building stock. The kind of document a paid consultant produces. Williams told the River Reporter he hadn’t been “commissioned” for the work, that he was “offer[ing] his thoughts as a citizen.” That’s how the council received it. As thoughts. From a citizen.

Run the same document through a different cover sheet. Imagine it arrives stamped “Canaltown, LLC, a for-profit Pennsylvania business operated by Derek Williams and Lisa Glover.” The pages don’t change. What changes is everything around them — who has standing to submit, what the clerk logs it as, whether it enters the record as community input or as something a borough employee may need to recuse from. Same content. A completely different document.

That’s what the framing does.

Williams interviews Glover

On Canaltown’s Facebook page, there’s a video. Williams interviews Glover. He’s behind the camera. She’s on it. The format is conventional: a question, an answer, a follow-up, a sign-off. The subject is a matter of local interest in Honesdale.

Williams and Glover live together. They have for years. Glover sits on the Honesdale Park and Recreation Commission as Vice-Chair. She co-founded the People’s Playground Project, which the borough is now funding to the tune of roughly $400,000. She is, on every public-facing surface Canaltown maintains, the company’s other principal — listed alongside Williams in the bios, the donor entries, the press photos, and the festival credits.

None of that gets named in the video. A viewer sees a journalist-style figure interviewing what looks like an independent local voice. The relationship signals are there for people who already know — a familiarity in the way they talk, an occasional flirtation that plays as a long-running joke. Insiders catch it. Newcomers don’t.

The defense will be that nobody in Honesdale is fooled. The Canaltown audience knows. The relationship is hardly a secret.

But disclosure isn’t a social arrangement. It’s a legal one, and it works by being available to everyone equally — the longtime resident who catches every wink and the family that moved here in March. Insider knowledge is uneven by definition. Public records aren’t. The whole point of writing things down is so it doesn’t matter whether you happen to be in the room.

A wink at the audience is not a substitute for a sentence on screen.

What we want from the mayor

There’s one Canaltown. The Commonwealth has had it on file since March 2014. Lisa Glover has been its public-facing co-principal for most of that time. Derek Williams has been its sole listed officer for all of it. Everything else — the project framing, the initiative framing, the community page, the spirit of the gift, the video that interviews her like she’s a stranger — is something the company has decided to tell the world.

The state’s version is the one with weight. We’ve asked for it in writing. What Williams does with that ask is up to him.

Mayor Derek Williams can be reached through Honesdale Borough Hall at 958 Main Street, Honesdale, PA 18431, or by phone at (570) 253-0731. Pocono Review will publish his response in full. Send to tips@poconoreview.com.

Pocono Review covers Wayne, Monroe, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties.