Honesdale Borough tore out a children’s playground on a paid consultant’s unfinished report, buried the state’s letter clearing the soil, and handed the $400,000 replacement to the mayor’s domestic partner.

Read Part 2: Lisa Glover & Derek Williams: Same Bed, Same Foundation — the people behind the People’s Playground Project, the $14M foundation that funds it, and the IRS form that says no relationships exist.

Last October, Honesdale Borough tore out the children’s playground at Central Park. They told parents it was “necessary repairs.” It wasn’t. A 33-year-old bookstore owner with no environmental credentials had given an unfinished verbal report claiming contamination at a Parks and Recreation Commission meeting, and the interim borough manager — a contractor from another county — ordered the equipment removed in a single sentence at that 8 AM meeting. No council vote. No written report. No public notice. Twelve days later, the playground was gone.

Then the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection sent the borough a letter. The soil didn’t exceed state standards. The borough buried it at the back of a council agenda — between a gas leak notice and a bank quote — at the same meeting they censured the one councilman who’d asked questions. Parents were never told. Six months later, they still haven’t been. Lead was found in the soil too. Parents weren’t told that either.

The man whose report justified all of it wasn’t a volunteer. The borough was paying him through invoices, on work orders he requested himself. The press described him as a community member running a nonprofit. The documents say otherwise. The woman now leading the $400,000 replacement project shares the mayor’s home and sits on the board of the very organization the mayor’s paid consultant operated through. None of these relationships were disclosed at any council meeting, in any media coverage, or in any public document.

The meeting minutes that prove all of this were hidden from the public for six months. This is what really happened.

Editor’s note: Pocono Review previously cited a $129,588 figure as playground money. That was a framing error — that grant is for crosswalks. As of today, no state grant for the playground has been awarded.

Part 1: The infections-to-zinc switcheroo

Two sugar maples in Central Park died. For three years, the borough called it infections. Then Keenan Gruver showed up.

He’s 33, son of Brian Gruver from the Boyertown area in southeastern Pennsylvania, two-plus hours from Honesdale. He moved here and in 2022 opened Known Grove Books & More on Main Street. He also runs Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship — incorporated as a Pennsylvania nonprofit on March 15, 2023, but operating as a pass-through fund at the Wayne County Community Foundation. The River Reporter calls him its “executive director” as though it were a real organization. More on that in Part 2.

Gruver has no professional certifications in soil science, arboriculture, or environmental testing. None of the credentials Pennsylvania’s environmental remediation law requires for site assessment work — not a Professional Geologist under Act 2, not a Licensed Professional Engineer. No DEP-accredited laboratory has been identified in connection with his samples. His self-described title, on materials submitted to the borough, is “Ecological Restoration, Systems Biology, & Cognitive Dendrology Consultant.” Cognitive dendrology is not a recognized discipline. It does not appear in any academic database, in any forestry, botany, or environmental science curriculum at any accredited institution. He coined it himself. His prior tree-related employment, per a record reviewed by Pocono Review, was as a “Ground Worker” at Arbor Garden Tree & Landscape in the Denver area — the entry-level position in tree care, manual labor, not site assessment.

For a person whose work product triggered the removal of a public playground, Gruver has an unusually thin public footprint. No professional history. No educational record. No licensing. His only appearance in the Pennsylvania court system is a traffic citation he paid on a payment plan. The bookstore has a digital presence. The man behind it is nearly invisible.

He came to the borough to do a tree inventory. During that work, he approached the Wayne County Arts Alliance about turning the dead stumps into sculptures. The WCAA approved it. The project manager: Lisa Glover — a WCAA board member, former Parks and Recreation Commission member, board member of Gruver’s Known Grove, and the mayor’s domestic partner, confirmed via matching bios on walking4mayor.com and her Audible author page (both reference “twin rabbits Twigs and Pebble”).

Even Glover — sitting on Gruver’s Known Grove board — publicly described the soil as beneficial. On the Honesdale Parks and Rec Facebook page, she wrote that keeping the stumps intact had funneled “nutrients in the soil near these trees” into nearby trees, making them “noticeably healthier this year than they were last year.” That was the public story in August 2025. The soil was good.

Then her board member changed the diagnosis. The trees, Gruver now said, weren’t killed by infections. They were killed by zinc leaching from tire mulch beneath the playground. He reported 797 parts per million. The same soil Glover told the public was funneling nutrients was now, according to her own board member, contaminated. The River Reporter itself called his finding a “correlation.” Not causation.

No certified arborist was consulted — before the art project or after the soil report. No tissue analysis. No core samples. No root examination. No investigation into verticillium wilt, sapstreak, road salt, soil compaction, root rot, or drought stress — all routine killers of downtown sugar maples. Gruver evaluated the trees in November and December 2024, dormant season only. Standard tree assessment practice calls for evaluation in both dormant and growing seasons.

The borough removed the playground the week of October 19, 2025. Parents were told “necessary repairs.”

Part 2: The volunteer who wasn’t

Every public mention of Gruver’s work on Central Park described him the same way: executive director of a nonprofit, community member, bookstore owner who came forward with concerns about the trees. The framing was a community member doing work for the public good. The documents say something else.

Gruver’s December 2024 ecological report — the document the borough secretary forwarded to officials in January 2025 — is signed “Keenan S. Gruver / Forest Systems Biology Consultant / Known Grove SLS.” Consultant. The word he chose for himself. The same report did not actually find soil contamination. It identified two sugar maples as critical hazards based on visible decline — Fomes fungus, deadwood canopy — and recommended their removal on those grounds. The soil testing he later cited as the basis for the playground removal was, in his own report, a future paid study he was proposing the borough fund.

The borough’s October 27, 2025 council minutes record that Gruver “requested a work order to be able to perform a soil test.” A work order is the document a municipality uses to authorize billable work by an outside vendor. Internal borough correspondence in early January 2025, reviewed by Pocono Review, raised concerns about Known Grove’s invoicing pattern — that the entity was registered as a nonprofit but billing the borough as a for-profit consultancy. The same correspondence flagged questions about the founder’s credentials. Nine months before the playground was removed.

None of this appeared in any public coverage. The River Reporter introduced Gruver in August 2025 as having “reported to the borough as part of a Central Park tree inventory.” In October, the same outlet introduced him as “Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship Executive Director Keenan Gruver” who had “conducted soil testing on Central Park.” The River Reporter, October 26: “Borough manager Kevin Kundratic worked with Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship Executive Director Keenan Gruver to conduct said testing on Central Park.”

Worked with. Conducted testing. Executive director. Not paid consultant. Not vendor. Not contractor. The public was told a community member did the work. The documents say he was paid for it.

Part 3: DEP said safe. The borough kept quiet.

PA DEP sent the borough a letter in November 2025. Contents per the November 24 council agenda: “PA DEP, notification that Central Park soil does not exceed standards.” The borough listed it between a UGI gas leak notice and a Wayne Bank quote. No announcement. No correction. No note to parents.

The science Gruver presented was wrong. He told council on October 27 that zinc levels were “elevated to 17 times the plant toxicity levels by a factor of four or greater.” His own figures — 797 PPM against a screening level of approximately 70 PPM — work out to roughly 11 times. The 70 PPM threshold he referenced measures harm to earthworms and microbes. It is not a human health standard. The actual standard — PA DEP’s Statewide Health Standard for residential zinc soil under Act 2 — is 66,000 PPM. The playground tested at 1.2% of that. Peer-reviewed literature pegs EC50 for zinc phytotoxicity at approximately 1,600 PPM, double his figure. He never reported soil pH, without which a zinc reading is scientifically incomplete.

His validation was a farming office: he “checked with the Wayne Conservation District” — which advises on erosion and stormwater, doesn’t accredit sampling protocols, and doesn’t evaluate environmental testing methodology. His report, per the minutes, “had kind of got lost a little bit” before he resubmitted it directly to the borough secretary.

Tire mulch does leach zinc. That’s real. It also leaches lead, cadmium, PAHs, VOCs, and 6PPD-quinone — chemicals the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have been studying for years. Gruver didn’t invent the concern. He drafted an alarming finding from a real one — without the methodology, credentials, or laboratory work to support the conclusions he drew. The zinc is probably in the soil. “Zinc is present” and “zinc killed the trees and children are in danger” are different claims. The first is routine chemistry. The second requires proof he never provided. DEP looked at the same site and said it was safe. The borough had both at the same time. They told the public about one.

Part 4: The October 7 meeting that left no trace — until now

The censure rested on a single claim: that the Parks and Recreation Commission was informed about contamination at its October 7 meeting, and the councilman’s video misrepresented what was discussed. Pocono Review has obtained those minutes. They were written by borough secretary Judith Poltanis and never posted to ecode360 — the borough’s public records system where every other Commission meeting’s minutes are available. For six months, while the council used a Commission meeting to justify censuring one of its own members, the public couldn’t read it.

Now you can. It doesn’t say what they told you it said.

Tiffany Rogers wasn’t there for the soil discussion. The meeting began at 8 AM. After community partners departed, per the minutes: “Tiffany Rogers left the virtual meeting at 9 AM as per James H.” Rogers logged off before the soil discussion. She did not hear Gruver’s verbal presentation. She did not hear Kundratic’s removal decision. Three weeks later, at the October 27 council meeting, she said she “read the minutes of the second meeting which she did not attend” — and used a discussion she was not present for to justify stripping a fellow councilor of his committee assignments. She is now council president.

The report wasn’t done. From the minutes: “Keenan provided a verbal report on the soil analysis in Central Park. He stated that a full report is not ready as all the analysis reports were not received.” Partial results. Lab data not back. Twelve days later, the playground was gone.

Lead was found. The minutes record Gruver saying “zinc and lead were present in the sampling result that he had received.” Lead. At a children’s playground. Every piece of public coverage focused on zinc. Lead in soil at a children’s play area is a federally regulated concern under EPA standards. Six months later, the borough has not released the lead PPM reading, the lab that processed the samples, or chain of custody documentation.

Gruver contradicted himself in the same meeting. First: “the mulch is important for the park to reduce the toxins in the soil.” Then, minutes later: “the tire mulch within the playground surface area had higher concentration of toxins than would be recommended.” Same person. Same hour. The mulch was both remedy and poison. Nobody questioned the contradiction.

Kundratic made the call alone. From the minutes: “Kevin stated that the tire mulch should be scheduled for removal within two weeks.” That’s it. One sentence. From an interim borough manager, a contractor from Luzerne County not a Honesdale resident. No motion, no resolution, no vote.

The disclosure failure was borough-wide. Internal correspondence reviewed by Pocono Review in the days before October 7 shows borough staff struggling to coordinate Gruver’s appearance. The secretary was on auto-reply. The treasurer declined to forward inquiries about Gruver. The interim manager indicated he’d respond on his return. A council representative was chasing borough staff over multiple days to circulate Gruver’s samples ahead of the meeting. The narrative the council eventually settled on — that everyone in borough government was on the same page and one councilor alone was the bad actor — is not what these emails show.

The bylaws don’t match. At meeting’s end, members agreed to continue meeting “the first and third Tuesdays.” The Parks and Recreation Commission bylaws on ecode360 specify “the fourth Monday of each month at 7:30 p.m.” A standing public body was meeting on a schedule that didn’t match its public bylaws.

No vote, no authority. Search the October 27 minutes for a motion to remove the playground. It isn’t there. No motion. No vote. No resolution. The playground was already gone — removed eight days before the full council heard about it.

November 24: everything at once. One council meeting, three things. The DEP letter — confirming soil within state standards — buried in correspondence. The censure, 5-1. And Lisa Glover presenting the People’s Playground Project — the replacement for the playground her partner’s administration removed based on her board member’s incomplete report — confirming it would fundraise through the WCCF, her partner’s employer. No relationships disclosed. The PPP now has its own page on the official borough website.

What comes next

The state said the soil was safe. The borough buried the letter at the same meeting they censured the man who asked questions. The minutes that prove what really happened on October 7 were hidden for six months. The man whose report justified all of it was a paid consultant the public was led to believe was a community volunteer.

Part 2 is about who did it and why. A 33-year-old bookstore owner from Boyertown running a fund at a $14 million foundation. The mayor on the foundation’s payroll. His domestic partner on the soil guy’s board. $351,000 in county money that didn’t exist four years ago. A New York newspaper that covered for all of them — and only just disclosed the conflict, after six months. And the question nobody’s asked: who brought Keenan Gruver to Honesdale, and why did every door in town open for him?

Pocono Review covers Wayne, Monroe, Pike, Carbon, Lackawanna, and Luzerne counties. Tips, documents, and on-the-record accounts: tips@poconoreview.com. Anonymity respected.

Pocono Review is committed to accuracy. If you believe any fact in this report is incorrect, email tips@poconoreview.com with the specific claim and your supporting documentation. Verified corrections will be published promptly.

Read Part 2: Lisa Glover & Derek Williams: Same Bed, Same Board, Same Foundation — the people behind the People’s Playground Project, the $14M foundation that funds it, and the IRS form that says no relationships exist.

• The Money Circle
• Six Months, Seven Articles, No Disclosure
• From Reporter to Mayor
• A Letter on Mayor Derek Williams
• Canaltown and Mayor Williams
• Honesdale Residents Take Charge of Central Park Playground Redesign

Correction, September 2, 2026: An earlier version of this article presented the sentence “Borough manager Kevin Kundratic worked with Known Grove Sacred Land Stewardship Executive Director Keenan Gruver to conduct said testing” as a statement by Kundratic at the October 27, 2025 council meeting. The sentence is from the River Reporter’s October 26, 2025 story, not from the meeting or its minutes.