Honesdale, Wayne County — When Honesdale Borough Council voted 5-2 on April 27, 2026 to commit $400,000 to the People’s Playground Project, there was no independent citizen commission to review the proposal first. There hadn’t been for some time.
The last public record of the commission functioning dates to April 2022, when borough council approved the resignations of two commission members — Guario Curiel and Faraji Starks — with no documented replacement appointments. Before that, the commission had been active enough to recommend its own appointments and weigh in on borough parks decisions. After April 2022, there is no publicly indexed record of the commission meeting, making appointments, or issuing recommendations. Glover held the vice-chair seat during this period. By November 2025, the Pennsylvania Economy League — a nonpartisan state consulting firm engaged by the borough to audit its finances and operations — was recommending the borough reestablish the commission in an advisory role. That language means one thing: the commission had stopped functioning before PPP ever arrived.
Under its own bylaws, established by borough council in 1996, the commission was designed to be independent. Members were appointed by council to staggered five-year terms. Meetings were publicly noticed. Minutes were recorded. Its mandate, drawn directly from the borough code, was to “formulate policies, advise, recommend, promote and maintain public parks and recreation” on behalf of Honesdale residents. It could have reviewed the playground removal, evaluated PPP’s proposal on the merits, and put a recommendation on the public record before any vote.
A Survey in Place of Oversight
That process did not happen. What council received instead, as its measure of public will, was a survey.
Not a borough survey. PPP’s survey — written by the project’s organizers, distributed through PPP’s own channels, and tallied by the same people proposing the $400,000 commitment. Lisa Glover, PPP’s co-founder and lead organizer, told the River Reporter the process generated 1,622 pieces of feedback across two online surveys. She cited that number as a community mandate, comparing it favorably to the Wayne County Comprehensive Plan update, which received 329 survey replies, and the Greater Honesdale Partnership’s revitalization plan, which received 550.
That comparison doesn’t hold. The Wayne County Comprehensive Plan and the Greater Honesdale Partnership plan are formal government and quasi-governmental planning processes with independent administration. PPP’s surveys were administered by the group seeking the public money. There is no public record of the survey instrument — the actual questions asked — nor any independent verification of who responded or where they live.
The Placemaking Playbook
This is not an unusual feature of PPP’s approach. It is the approach.
The Center on Rural Innovation — a Google-founded nonprofit where Glover worked as a Placemaking Fellow between 2022 and 2024, and whose methods Pocono Review has documented in detail — describes its “lighter, quicker, cheaper” placemaking model as providing “the ability to try out a concept to get buy-in from people and see if a project is even viable.” Glover herself has said the method gives community members “something actionable to do” that generates buy-in, with small projects building toward larger ones. The survey is part of that sequence — a tool for building the appearance of democratic legitimacy before the larger intervention.
Who Filled the Vacuum
A functioning Recreation Commission would have interrupted that sequence, holding its own noticed meetings, requiring PPP to present to a body of appointed citizens with no stake in the outcome, and producing a recommendation council could weigh independently. Instead, the commission was not there.
The Pennsylvania Economy League did not specify in its public recommendations when the commission ceased to function or why. Borough council has not publicly explained it either.
What the record does show is the sequence: the commission went dormant; PPP emerged and ran its own public engagement process in the commission’s place; that process produced a feedback count PPP cited as a mandate; council voted on the strength of it.
Lisa Glover served as vice-chair of the Honesdale Parks and Recreation Commission before it went inactive. She co-founded the organization that replaced its public function. She was trained and paid by a national nonprofit to execute exactly this sequence in other people’s towns — where the purpose, in that organization’s own language, was preparing rural communities to attract tech workers and entrepreneurs.
Whether the commission’s dormancy enabled PPP, or PPP simply moved into a vacuum that already existed, the structural result is the same. The independent oversight body was gone. The engagement process that replaced it was run by the people who stood to benefit from its conclusions.
Pocono Review has been investigating Honesdale Borough government since April 2026. Related coverage: The People Behind PPP · The Bookstore Soil Report · Kendra Nelson’s Unannounced Hire · The Mayor’s Employer and His Girlfriend’s Arts Organization · Lisa Glover and Google
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