We received an email today from the husband of the new Honesdale Borough Manager — who is also a co-founder of the People’s Playground Project — asking us to “revise” our coverage of the project his wife founded. His name is Andrew Nelson. Hers is Kendra Nelson, née Amick. The borough, we believe, has had her in the manager’s chair since April but hasn’t told the public.
Andrew Nelson’s email mentioned none of that. He wrote in his own name, as if he were just another resident with thoughts about grant accounting, and asked us privately to fix it. We’re not going to. We’re writing back here, in public, where Honesdale can read every word.
Mr. Nelson may believe every word he wrote. We’re not accusing him of dishonesty. But when you’re married to the woman running both the project and the borough, you don’t get to write to a publication as a concerned bystander. You disclose the relationship, or you don’t write the email. He chose option three: write it anyway and hope nobody noticed.
Mr. Nelson is entitled to his opinion the same as any Honesdale resident, and many in town share his view that the People’s Playground Project is a fine project that deserves quiet support. Reasonable people can disagree. That’s exactly why we’re laying our position out in public instead of trading edits over email: so Honesdale can hear both sides and decide for itself.
So here’s the whole argument.
Nelson’s Claim
His argument boils down to one claim: the borough hasn’t formally allocated general funds to the playground, so calling this a borough-funded project is wrong. Grants and donations, he writes, will pay for it.
We hear the distinction. Technically, no — the council hasn’t cut a check from a line item labeled “playground.” Practically, that doesn’t matter. The distinction sounds clean on paper and falls apart the moment you look at the documents.
The Money
Start with what triggered all of this. The borough pulled the playground in October 2025 based on a volunteer’s unfinished soil report — a report some would call fraudulent, and one we’ve broken down in detail elsewhere. The state’s environmental regulator told the borough a month later that the soil was fine. The borough buried that letter in the routine correspondence section of its November 24 meeting and never mentioned it again. The playground stayed gone anyway.
Residents were told replacements were coming. Grants would pay for it. The framing implied the money was lined up.
So here’s the question Honesdale should be asking.
Why did the borough council vote 5-2 on April 27 to approve the design and the $400,000 cost of this project without the money in hand?
You don’t sign off on a $400,000 build when the grants are pending or denied and the rest is hypothetical donations. None of those grants is guaranteed. Anyone planning a $400,000 project on the assumption they’ll keep flowing is making a bet, not a budget — and if the bet doesn’t pay off, the borough is the party that signed. No PPP corporation can be sued for the shortfall. No donor is on the hook. If construction stalls or donations don’t materialize, the only place left to look is the borough’s general fund. That’s not how anyone runs a household budget. It is, apparently, how Honesdale is being run.
Whatever you call the April 27 vote — a commitment, an authorization, an approval — the borough is the partner of record, the borough is filing the grants, the borough owns the land. The legal exposure is the same regardless of which fund the dollars eventually flow through. Nobody in borough leadership corrected the impression. Honesdale families — the ones who pay the property taxes that keep that park standing, who grew up on those swings, who donated to it for years — have been shut out of the public space they help fund, with no working answer on when they’ll get it back.
Then the same names that ran the original removal showed up as the founders of a new private group, the People’s Playground Project — Lisa Glover, Kendra Nelson, and a small circle around them — asking the borough to commit to a $400,000 partnership routed through a foundation that employs Mayor Derek Williams. Eight months after the equipment came down. Still no playground.
The playground didn’t need to come out before the money showed up. The trees Mr. Gruver was concerned about could have been addressed without removing the structures children were using. The decision to take it out first and figure out the funding later was a political decision, made by a small group of people, justified by a report that wouldn’t survive a peer review, and never honestly explained to the public.
Central Park Deed
The borough doesn’t get to decide whether it owes Central Park anything. It already does.
Central Park is borough land, held in public trust under an 1833 deed. The obligation to maintain it isn’t optional. Pennsylvania Borough Code (8 Pa.C.S. §§ 2701, 2704) requires the borough to maintain its parks. The Tort Claims Act (42 Pa.C.S. § 8542) makes the borough liable for injuries on parkland it possesses. Honesdale’s own Parks and Recreation Plan claims Central Park as borough responsibility, in writing. If a child gets hurt on equipment installed through PPP’s “private” pipeline, the borough is the defendant. If donations dry up mid-build, the borough is left holding a half-finished park.
The 1833 deed goes further. It bound the borough to “improve and ornament” the property “in a progressive manner appropriate to its being a pleasant and ornamental public plot of ground and place for public resort.” That language requires active, continuous improvement. It does not allow the borough to fence the park off and walk away.
For more than thirty years, the borough has read that obligation to include playground equipment. The Jaycees donated the first slide and teeter-totter in 1991. A major upgrade came in 2000. An ADA-accessible expansion went in by 2016. Each time, the council debated whether the deed allowed it, and each time the council said yes.
Ripping that equipment out and leaving Honesdale families locked out of a working public space for eight months — while a private group fundraises for replacements — is not “progressive improvement,” not “pleasant and ornamental,” and not a place for “public resort.” Whatever else the deed allows, it doesn’t allow that. And meanwhile, the borough’s own website hosts a page for the People’s Playground Project and routes residents to “Friends of Honesdale Parks, Central Park Playground Fund held by WCCF” — fund ID 1726. When the borough hosts the page, builds the link, and channels donations to a particular foundation, the borough is endorsing the pipeline. Calling those funds “private” is a label, not a fact.
And the foundation at the end of the pipeline employs the mayor. The Wayne County Community Foundation (WCCF) saw its assets grow from roughly $9.9 million to over $14 million during Mayor Derek Williams’s first term. County dollars flowing through it grew from zero to more than $351,000 over the same window. Mayor Williams sits on both sides of the donation pipeline he and the borough are pointing residents toward. The land is public, the duty is public, the liability is public, and the people writing the grant applications are public employees on public time. The label on the budget line doesn’t change any of it.
Kendra Nelson’s hiring
Pocono Review has confirmed that Kendra Nelson began work as Honesdale’s top unelected official on Thursday, April 16, 2026 — eleven days before the council voted 5-2 on April 27 to commit Honesdale to a $400,000 partnership with the project she co-founded. She is also the former chair of the Parks and Recreation Commission, and her name appears on the original 2023 ADA playground grant filing.
The borough’s public record on her hiring stops at the March 4 council meeting. That night, council passed Ordinance No. 737, amending Chapter 8 of the borough code to rename the Borough Manager position to “Chief Administrative Officer” and modify the scope of duties. President Tiffany Rogers stated on the record that “interviews were being conducted for the new position.” Council noticed an executive session for March 12 to conduct those interviews. After March 12, the public record goes dark. No press release. No agenda item we can locate. No Sunshine Act notice for whatever meeting authorized the appointment. The borough’s own website still lists Kevin Kundratic as Interim Borough Manager.
The borough’s official minutes archive ends on March 4, 2026. As of today, May 5, no minutes have been published for any council meeting after that date — not the March 23 meeting referenced in other local coverage, not the March 12 executive session, not the April 27 meeting where the council voted 5-2 to commit the borough to the $400,000 PPP partnership. Two months of borough business is missing from the public record. Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act requires meeting minutes to be made publicly available. The borough’s own ordinances require approval and posting. The records simply are not there.
Three weeks after Ms. Nelson’s first day, the borough has had ample time to update its records. The borough has chosen not to. We don’t know her salary, though we believe it is in the range of $90,000. We don’t know which meeting authorized her appointment, the resolution number, the vote count, or whether the discussion happened in public session or behind closed doors. None of it has been released.
That silence matters. The position Ms. Nelson now holds is the highest-ranking unelected job in Honesdale — supervising every employee, every contract, and every grant application the borough files. Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act and the borough’s own ordinances require these decisions to be made in public, on the record, with notice to residents. The agenda, the resolution, the vote count, the salary, the contract — every one of those records should already be public. None of them are.
The questions Honesdale should be asking the borough today:
- When was Kendra Nelson appointed?
- At what meeting was the appointment authorized, and was that meeting properly noticed under the Sunshine Act?
- What is her salary, and what are the terms of her contract?
- Did Ms. Nelson disclose her role at the People’s Playground Project during the hiring process?
- Has Ms. Nelson recused herself from any borough business involving the People’s Playground Project, the playground project, or the Wayne County Community Foundation? If so, what does that recusal cover and who is handling the work in her place?
- Why have no council minutes been published since March 4, 2026?
- Why has the borough not announced the appointment to the public?
Until those questions are answered, the timeline speaks for itself. The People’s Playground Project’s co-founder has spent the last three weeks running the borough that just committed itself to her project. She was the Borough Manager when the borough website kept hosting the PPP donation page. She was the Borough Manager today, when her husband emailed Pocono Review asking us to soften our coverage of her project.
That puts Kendra Nelson inside what we’ve been calling “The Club”. Lisa Glover, Mayor Derek Williams’s domestic partner and a People’s Playground Project co-founder. Mayor Williams himself, on WCCF’s payroll while in office. Now Kendra Nelson, running the borough staff that handles her own project’s grants. And Andrew Nelson, married to her, writing private emails to Pocono Review on the project’s behalf without saying who he is.
We consider Mr. Nelson part of the club through marriage — not because of anything he’s done, but because of who he’s tied to and how that tie shapes the email he sent.
To Honesdale
We are not asking anyone to take our word for any of this. We are asking Honesdale to read the records, watch the council, and decide for itself.
The People’s Playground Project is not a quiet little fundraiser building a swing set in Honesdale’s Central Park. It is stitched into the borough’s grants, the mayor’s employer, the borough manager’s career path, the borough’s own website, and now the email habits of the borough manager’s husband. None of that is private. None of it should be settled by a quiet note between a sender who didn’t say who he was and a reporter he hoped would simply agree.
We disagree. We’d like to have the rest of the conversation out loud.
Tips, documents, and corrections: tips@poconoreview.com.
Pocono Review’s prior coverage of the People’s Playground Project and the network around it:
- The Bookstore Soil Scientist (Part 1)
- The People Behind PPP (Part 2)
- 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