Honesdale, Wayne County — Lisa Glover has served as vice-chair of Honesdale’s Parks and Recreation Commission, the girlfriend of Mayor Derek Williams, and the co-founder of the People’s Playground Project. Before any of that, she was paid through a federal grant to reshape rural towns for the tech economy.

Not directly. Through a grant.

Between 2022 and 2024, Glover worked as a Placemaking Fellow at Rural Innovation Strategies, Inc. — the consulting arm of a national nonprofit called the Center on Rural Innovation. CORI received a Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop what it calls “innovation district placemaking plans” in three rural towns: Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Rutland, Vermont; and Selma, Alabama.

Glover was the person CORI sent to do the work.

The stated goal was not parks or murals or crosswalks. The stated goal, in CORI’s own language, was “developing downtown innovation districts that can attract and retain tech workers and entrepreneurs.”

Then she brought the method home.

The commission Glover served on appears to have gone dormant. In November 2025, the Pennsylvania Economy League — brought in to assess Honesdale Borough’s finances and operations — recommended that the borough reestablish a Recreation Commission in an advisory role, a sign that the body had stopped functioning in any meaningful capacity. The commission was the institution designed to provide independent citizen oversight of parks decisions: council-appointed members, public meetings, recorded minutes. Without it, there was no independent body to evaluate what happened to Central Park’s playground, weigh options, or put recommendations on the record before a vote. That gap opened in the fall of 2025. PPP walked through it.

What CORI Is

The Center on Rural Innovation was founded in 2017 by Matt Dunne, a former Vermont state legislator who in 2007 started Google’s Community Affairs division. At Google, Dunne led “educational and development initiatives in Google’s data center communities across rural America,” according to CORI’s own team page.

CORI’s mission is building “tech economy ecosystems” in small towns. It operates a venture fund that invests in rural tech startups. It runs a Rural Innovation Network of 43 member communities across 26 states. It partners with Cisco and Google on workforce training. Its tagline, pulled from the top of its website: “advancing AI adoption, tech startups, workforce skills & inclusive economic opportunity.”

Rural Innovation Strategies, Inc. — Glover’s employer during the USDA grant work — is CORI’s sister organization. Same leadership. Same office. Same mission.

Glover holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master of engineering in technical entrepreneurship from Lehigh University. She has described herself as a “self-employed consultant” and, in CORI’s public materials, as the organization’s “placemaking expert.”

What She Did for CORI

CORI received USDA funding in 2022 and spent 18 months deploying Glover to three communities.

Her method: “lighter, quicker, cheaper” placemaking — small, inexpensive projects designed to generate community buy-in before larger interventions. In Pine Bluff, she powerwashed a neglected lot and planned a little free library. In Selma, wayfinding signs. In Rutland, she converted an abandoned lot into an open-air art gallery, pushed for crosswalks, and worked on streetscaping for what CORI calls the “Downtown Innovation District.”

Each project is modest. A cleaned-up lot. A crosswalk. A sign. Hard to oppose. Easy to celebrate.

But in Rutland, CORI also secured a separate $50,000 USDA grant to equip a “digital-economy incubator and accelerator” — smartboards, laptops, wireless access points. CORI calculated that 300 additional people could live downtown if unused upper floors were converted to apartments. That’s density planning for a tech workforce that doesn’t exist yet.

The USDA featured Rutland as a success story on its website in November 2024. Glover was quoted extensively. The article called her work the model for how rural communities can prepare for “the digital economy.”

At CORI, this method has a name. It’s called building a “Rural Innovation District.”

Honesdale

Pocono Review has spent the last month documenting what happened to Central Park. The verbal soil report that killed the playground — produced by Keenan Gruver, Glover’s own board member at Known Grove — has faced serious scrutiny. DEP cleared the soil; the borough buried the letter. Weeks before Gruver’s verbal report took the playground out, Glover was on Facebook telling residents the park ecosystem was thriving — that “the nearby trees are noticeably healthier this year than they were last year” and the stumps “keep the whole park ecosystem healthier.”

The people behind PPP, the undisclosed conflicts, Kendra Nelson’s unannounced hire as borough manager eleven days before the council vote, and PPP’s potential violations of Pennsylvania charitable solicitation law — we’ve reported all of it.

What we hadn’t reported until now is where the method comes from.

Crosswalks. Murals. Stump art. Park redesigns. Community surveys cited as legitimacy. Small projects first, then the bigger intervention. It’s the same sequence Glover ran in Rutland, Pine Bluff, and Selma under a USDA grant — where the stated purpose was attracting tech workers and entrepreneurs. In those towns, CORI disclosed the program. In Honesdale, the placemaking just looks like a girlfriend helping fix up a park.

What’s Coming to Wayne County

On April 30, 2026, an application was submitted to the Clinton Township Planning Commission for a data center and power-generating facility on 743 acres of forested wetland owned by the Linde Corporation, less than a mile from Forest City. Between 200 and 300 residents packed a pole barn to oppose it. A second meeting followed May 13.

The person who first flagged the proposal publicly was Keenan Gruver — the same Known Grove founder who produced the Central Park soil report, who shares a board with Glover, and whose organization’s charitable fund is administered by Williams’ employer. Gruver opposing a data center in Wayne County while Glover executes a placemaking program designed by an organization built on Google’s data center community engagement — on a board they share — is a contradiction that deserves scrutiny.

Eleven data center campuses are moving through Lackawanna County next door. Amazon dropped $20 billion in Luzerne. David Tolson, the developer pushing data centers into Lackawanna, was born in Wayne County. The industry is circling northeastern Pennsylvania, and it is looking for towns that are ready.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

Are Lisa Glover and Mayor Derek Williams quietly laying the groundwork for the data center industry in Wayne County?

Their supporters don’t appear to know this is even a question. Nobody who showed up to PPP meetings, donated to WCAA, or voted to approve the park redesign was told where the placemaking methodology comes from, what organization developed it, or what its stated purpose is.

Glover and Williams aren’t telling the people who back them that the method being applied to their town was designed to prepare rural communities for tech-sector investment — and that Glover was trained and paid to execute it in other people’s towns before she brought it home.

Maybe it’s innocent. Maybe she just likes parks and crosswalks and murals.

But CORI’s entire model is about making towns ready. Glover was trained in that model. She is executing it in Honesdale. And nobody has been told what it’s for.

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