James Hamill Says He Killed the Parks Commission.

Honesdale, Wayne County — When Pocono Review published “Who Killed the Parks Commission?”, Borough Councilor James Hamill reached out with an answer. “If someone killed the commission,” he wrote, “it was me.”

That’s a convenient thing to say. Taking personal blame for a collective institutional failure isn’t accountability. It’s a way of making the story about one person instead of a council that made a deliberate, unanimous choice and then watched what happened next.

The Parks and Recreation Commission went quiet around April 2022. Two members resigned, council accepted the resignations, and after that there’s no public record of the commission meeting, making appointments, or producing recommendations on anything. Three years passed. By November 2025, the Pennsylvania Economy League had been brought in to audit borough operations and was recommending the commission be rebuilt from scratch.

Who Left and Why It Matters

Hamill’s account fills in what’s convenient to him. The members who left, he says, were Lisa Glover, Kendra Nelson, and Trey Talley. Glover was the commission’s vice-chair, PPP’s co-founder, Mayor Derek Williams’s girlfriend, and his business partner through Canaltown LLC. Nelson would later co-found PPP and get hired as borough manager eleven days before a 5-2 council vote approved a $400,000 partnership with PPP. Talley’s wife Peggy is also a PPP co-founder. When those three left, council left the seats empty.

Under borough code, that’s not how it’s supposed to work. Council appoints commission members. When someone leaves, council fills the seat. No outgoing member has to find their own replacement. It’s not complicated.

Hamill confirmed council didn’t do it. His explanation: “To be honest, the commission as it was with that trio left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouths on council — it was unanimous — that we didn’t look to chance more of the same.”

Voting No Wasn’t Enough

Every member of that council decided that a difficult commission was worse than no commission at all. Hamill was one of them. He was censured by those same colleagues and stripped of committee assignments, and he presents himself as the guy asking hard questions. But on this, he voted with the room.

Voting no on the PPP proposal is the minimum. He did not tell the public what he has since described about the relationships between PPP’s leadership and the borough apparatus, did not propose recruiting new commission members from outside the network, and did not disclose that the same people who had just left the commission he chaired were now behind a proposal that council would approve for $400,000 in public support.

In place of the commission, Hamill says council held monthly meetings with community groups to gather input. He mentions that things went better when Carolyn Lorent, a former council member, stayed involved. A former council member, inside a council-run process, without the people who’d been difficult. That’s not a substitute for independent oversight. A commission holds noticed public meetings. It operates under formal appointment with staggered terms. Its recommendations go on the record. Monthly check-ins run by the same body that chose not to rebuild oversight aren’t the same thing, and calling them equivalent doesn’t make it so.

PPP Filled the Vacuum

While the seats sat empty, PPP filed into the space. The same network that had just vacated the commission came back through a different door with a $400,000 proposal and a survey they controlled.

Hamill acknowledged that commission seats were regularly advertised. He didn’t address what that means. An open application process could have seated new members within weeks. Residents with no connection to WCAA, WCCF, PPP, or any organization tied to this story. People who might have looked at the playground removal, the unverified soil report, and a $400,000 proposal from a private project run by the mayor’s girlfriend and pushed back. Council never went looking for those people. Nobody in that room seems to have asked whether the solution to a captured commission was to open it up.

There was one more thing in Hamill’s message. He wrote about his personal relationship with Williams and Glover. “I gave a lot to our relationship — mine with Derek and Lisa.” A sitting councilor explaining a public governance failure in terms of personal loyalty isn’t some aside. That sentence is the whole story. The commission didn’t collapse over policy. It collapsed because of who got along with whom, who left a bad taste, who was in “The Club” and who wasn’t. The seats stayed empty because filling them felt like a risk to something social, not something procedural.

PPP walked away with the green light to raise $400,000 for a public park, the borough’s name, and the credibility that comes with official municipal partnership — all without independent oversight, a public vetting process, or a functioning citizen commission to scrutinize any of it. The Parks and Recreation Commission is still dead.

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