Opinion | Analysis. Statements marked [FACT] are supported by documented records, emails obtained via Right-to-Know request, or PA DEP correspondence. Statements marked [SPECULATION] are the author’s interpretation.
On November 18, 2025, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection sent Honesdale Borough its verdict on the Central Park soil. Here is the key passage:
“While it appears the areas near where the tire mulch was used may have been slightly impacted, none of the results exceed any statewide health standards. DEP does not see any need to remove these soils.” [FACT]
Nothing exceeded state health standards. The state saw no need to remove anything.
By the time that email arrived, the playground had been gone for a month. The borough never told you the state said it didn’t need to be.
We obtained these emails through a Right-to-Know request submitted by a reader. Months ago we started sounding the alarm about an unfinished soil report and what looked like manufactured urgency. The borough called the removal necessary. There is no version of this story left where that’s true.
The Timeline
The playground came out the week of October 19, 2025. [FACT] Hold onto that date. Everything below happens after the equipment is already on the ground.
October 27, 2:36 PM. Keenan Gruver, a Known Grove board member and bookstore owner with no soil science credentials, emailed the borough with the mayor copied: “Finished the soils report well enough to assist in tonight’s meeting. It’s not as thorough as I would like, but that’s the way it goes.” [FACT]
The person who produced the report told the borough, in writing, that it wasn’t done. The playground was already gone.
October 27, that evening. Gruver told Borough Council the soil was contaminated at “17 times the plant toxicity levels.” He had no written report with him. He presented from memory. [FACT] Council heard a verbal claim from a non-expert who had told them hours earlier his work wasn’t finished, and nobody asked to see the data.
November 5. Interim Borough Manager Kevin Kundratic forwarded the soil results to DEP and asked for “expertise advice on next steps, remediation, etc.” [FACT] Two and a half weeks after removal, the borough was still asking the state whether removal was warranted.
November 18. DEP answered. No. [FACT]
November 19. Kundratic forwarded DEP’s clearance to the DPW director and three other borough staff under the subject line “FYI.” [FACT] That is the last anyone in government said about it. There was no press release and no correction. The parents who had been told their kids were playing on poison were never told otherwise.
When an unfinished verbal claim from a non-expert justified tearing out a playground, the borough moved in days. When the state’s completed finding said there had been no reason to, the borough filed it under “FYI” and went quiet.
What We Believe
We believe this was fraud, not incompetence. [SPECULATION]
Gruver sits on the Known Grove board alongside Lisa Glover, who is the mayor’s domestic partner, a co-founder of People’s Playground Project, and the designer of the replacement park. Gruver walked into a public meeting with claims the state would reject three weeks later. The removal his claims justified created exactly what PPP’s fundraiser needed: a town with no playground and parents who wanted one back.
This is the chain we believe connects it. Tear out the playground on an unfinished verbal report. Promise to relocate the equipment so nobody fights the removal. Let the promise quietly die. Let the equipment land in a junk pile behind the maintenance building. Let a full summer pass with zero playgrounds anywhere in Honesdale. Let the pressure build. Then show up with the solution: help us raise money for a park that could cost $400,000, and we’ll fix what we broke. A working park doesn’t need a rescue fund. An empty one does. [SPECULATION]
The Book on the Bed
If that sounds cynical, consider how the mayor himself responded the last time we reported on this. In May, after we documented that his domestic partner sat on Gruver’s board, designed the replacement, and had disclosed none of it, Derek Williams didn’t answer with documents. He posted a staged bedroom photograph with Edward Bernays’s Propaganda propped spine-out on the bed.
Bernays’s argument is that the public doesn’t need to understand what’s being done to it as long as someone manages what it’s allowed to see. Williams put that book where the camera would catch it. The soils cover-up is that argument put into practice, on you.
What Should Happen Next
Pennsylvania law already covers this. An undisclosed conflict of interest by a public official carries felony penalties under the state Ethics Act. Obtaining grant money or donations by reinforcing a false impression is theft by deception. Soliciting donations without registering, which PPP still hasn’t done, violates the Charitable Solicitation Act. If state or federal grant dollars moved through this chain, mail and wire fraud statutes apply. Those are the same statutes that sent a Philadelphia judge to federal prison for defrauding a state park grant fund.
So why hasn’t any of it happened?
Who Investigates the Investigators
Start with what’s documented.
Judge Janine Edwards has already shown what she does when family is on the line. When her niece, Jessi Sullum, was the subject of a criminal matter, Edwards used her position to steer it. We laid out the paper trail, and it ended in a $1.1 million federal settlement. That’s not a theory. That’s a settlement check. [FACT]
Derek Williams and Judge Edwards are first cousins. Two obituaries establish it. The 2016 obituary for Hazel Williams of Honesdale lists her children, including Cinda Tietjen and Vannie B. Williams Jr. The 2013 obituary for Dr. George Tietjen names Cinda as his wife and Janine Edwards as his stepdaughter. Derek is Vannie Jr.’s son. Same grandmother, same family. [FACT]
A.G. Howell succeeded Edwards as Wayne County District Attorney. His office is where a criminal referral on any of this would land. [FACT]
Now the part we can’t confirm. Hazel Williams’s obituary also lists a daughter, Sally W. Howell. That means a woman from the mayor’s family married into a Howell family a generation back. We don’t know whether Sally Howell is related to the DA. Howell is a common name in Honesdale, and there is more than one Howell family in town. But the public is unaware of most family relationships and marriages among the people who run this county until someone goes digging through obituaries, and given who we’ve already found in this one family tree, it’s a possibility worth keeping in view. [UNCONFIRMED]
We’re laying that out because readers deserve to see what a rumor is built on rather than have it float around Facebook unsourced. If it’s wrong, it dies here. If it’s right, the same extended family sits on both sides of every office that would need to act.
The Test
Does Howell refer this to the state Attorney General instead of handling it himself? Does the State Ethics Commission open and complete an investigation into Williams’s undisclosed relationship to Glover and PPP? Does anyone, whether DA, AG, or Ethics Commission, take a single documented step?
If the answer to all three is no, we won’t need the Howell rumor to make the point. Edwards protecting her niece is already a documented case of a Wayne County official putting family ahead of the public. Her cousin is the mayor at the center of this one. A second silence, in a second case, in the same family, is what turns “good-ol’-boy network” from an accusation into the explanation that remains. And it’s what makes the Howell question worth asking out loud.
If any of them act, we’ll report it, and we’ll mean it when we say the system worked.
We don’t think it will.
Sources: Gruver email to Honesdale Borough, Oct. 27, 2025, 2:36 PM; Kundratic email to PA DEP, Nov. 5, 2025; DEP (Roger Bellas) response to Honesdale Borough, Nov. 18, 2025; Kundratic internal forward, Nov. 19, 2025, all obtained via Right-to-Know request. Honesdale Borough Council minutes, Oct. 27, 2025. Family relationships: Hazel Williams obituary, Arthur A. Bryant Funeral Home, Sept. 2016; Dr. George Tietjen obituary, Tri-County Independent, July 2013. Send tips to tips@poconoreview.com. Correction requests to corrections@poconoreview.com.