A working park doesn’t need a rescue fund. A missing one does.

Opinion and Analysis

On the People’s Playground Project’s Facebook page, people are still voicing their concerns — Lisa Glover and her supporters are still gaslighting them.

“I still stand on my previous comment. It made NO sense to take out the old playground before finances were in order for a new one to be put in its place. It was taken out for safety reasons. (The ground underneath was fine). It’s a disgrace that the children have no park for the entire summer.” — Chalet on the Green, Facebook comment

Removing the park before the money was raised, that’s exactly what you’d expect if the park was never really the point. Raising money was. Removing a working park and replacing it with an empty lot is precisely how you manufacture urgency. Nobody opens their wallet for a park that’s fine. They open it for one that’s gone.

The book on the nightstand

Fact: Honesdale Mayor Derek Williams keeps a copy of Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, the 1928 book that laid the groundwork for what Bernays would later call “the engineering of consent”: manufacturing crises, controlling which facts reach the public, and moving fast enough that people react instead of think. Lisa Glover, Williams’ domestic partner and PPP co-founder, took the photo of the book. She has confirmed this in the comments.

Bernays’ whole thesis is that propaganda isn’t lying — it’s deciding which questions get asked and which never do. Read the last seven months of this story against that lens and the pattern isn’t subtle: a crisis manufactured on an unfinished report, a clearing letter buried on a meeting agenda, and a fundraising campaign launched before anyone could ask whether the crisis was real.

The trees that were “growing beautifully” — until they weren’t

Fact: In August 2025, Glover posted on the Honesdale Parks and Rec Facebook page that leaving the dead stumps in place had funneled nutrients into nearby trees, making them “noticeably healthier this year than they were last year.” Two months later, her own Known Grove board member, Keenan Gruver, told the borough the same soil was contaminated with zinc. That was the finding that got the playground pulled in twelve days, on a report he admitted wasn’t finished.

Same soil. Same circle of people. First it’s feeding the trees. Then, with no explanation in between, it’s poisoning them. Glover doesn’t get to have it both ways: nourishing in August, hazardous in October, without someone asking what actually changed.

What Julie left out

After Chalet on the Green’s comment above, Julie Rose Romano stepped in to shut it down: citing the DEP letter and walking through how zinc can inhibit tree root growth, framed as though it settled the matter. Here’s the problem. The only thing the public actually knows about that letter is what was listed on the November 24 council agenda: “PA DEP, notification that Central Park soil does not exceed standards.” Nobody outside the borough has seen the letter itself. Julie describes its contents (zinc thresholds, tree-specific harm) in detail, as though she’s read something the rest of the commenters can’t see.

The zinc numbers she’s citing don’t come from DEP. They come from Gruver’s report. DEP said the soil didn’t exceed standards, full stop, no PPM figures attached in anything the public has seen. The 797 PPM zinc reading, Gruver’s claim that zinc was “elevated to 17 times the plant toxicity levels by a factor of four or greater,” all of it is Gruver’s work, not DEP’s. Julie folds the two together as though DEP validated Gruver’s findings, when the two documents actually point in opposite directions: one says the soil is fine, the other says it’s contaminated. I believe that’s not an accident. Conflating them is exactly how you make a removal built on a bookstore owner’s unfinished verbal report sound like it carries the state’s authority.

One more thing she leaves out: Gruver’s soil findings were never a finished, written report the public could actually read at the time the playground came out. He gave a verbal presentation on October 7 and said himself the full report wasn’t ready because the lab results hadn’t all come back. The playground was removed twelve days later on that basis. Nothing in writing anyone could review, question, or formally object to. Calling that a “report” is generous.

There’s also this: Julie has stated herself that she is a personal friend of Keenan Gruver, his partner Heather, Lisa Glover, and Derek Williams.

The DEP letter cite is real in the sense that the letter exists. What it actually says, beyond “soil does not exceed standards,” is not public. Julie’s zinc mechanism explanation is technically plausible on its own, but it leaves out that Gruver’s report was incomplete when the removal decision was made; that his own “17 times” claim doesn’t hold up against his own numbers, which work out closer to 11x; that no pH data was ever recorded and no arborist was ever consulted; and that Glover, sitting on Gruver’s board, publicly called the same soil beneficial two months earlier. She’s not lying. She’s citing a document nobody can verify while cherry-picking the parts that sound rigorous and skipping the parts that would undercut the removal decision, and skipping her own relationship to everyone involved. That’s the same move as Glover’s “want to volunteer?” deflection: technically responsive, substantively incomplete.

Nearly $20,000 later, still no accounting

Fact: PPP has publicly reported $15,000 raised during NEPA Gives, called “well over our goal,” plus $4,000-plus from a raffle: roughly $19,000 documented. A second post says organizers “blew away” expectations without citing a new total. A bench swing and swing bank have been ordered, with installation not expected for at least three months. PPP remains unregistered with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Charitable Organizations, despite a public fundraising goal of $400,000, twenty times the $25,000 documented threshold.

A normal person reading “blew away our goal” on top of a documented $19,000 would reasonably conclude the real number is higher — likely $25,000 or above. Whatever it is, the public isn’t being told, and there’s still no registration on file.

Still no park

Kids in Honesdale went the entire summer thus far without a playground. What they got so far was a swing set on order and a fundraising campaign nobody can audit. Bernays wrote that the public doesn’t resist propaganda when it’s well engineered — they thank you for it. Read the comment section. They are.