Park Commission Moves Meetings to 6 P.M. Start

Park Commission · Meeting of October 26, 2026

GROTON — The Groton Park Commission reset its meeting schedule and ranked new annual goals during an extended workshop Monday. Chair Mary Jennings and members Mark Presti, John "Jack" Petropoulos, Anna Eliot and Jeffrey Ohringer agreed to move meetings to a 6 to 9 p.m. window on alternate Mondays, replacing a 5 p.m. start repeatedly cut short by Community Preservation Committee meetings competing for the same room. Members unanimously adopted developing a permitting process and fee structure for park properties as their top short-term goal, then voted 4-1 to rank an expanded property-acquisition and management role above a professionally funded master-plan study for the longer term.

Jennings told colleagues the commission's budget has stayed flat for "15 years" and said she asked the Finance Committee for "at least 3% increase." Petropoulos said earlier permitting work stalled because "we had to leave our meetings at seven o'clock."

In the full story:

• Looking Back on FY26 Goals: Cutler Field, Cow Pond and a Stalled Permitting Push
• Staffing and Budget: A Shared Administrative Assistant and a Flat Bottom Line
• Setting Norms: How the Commission Talks to Itself
• A New Meeting Schedule
• Ranking FY27 Goals: Permitting, Property Management and a Master Plan
• Shepley Hill: A Conservation Restriction Deferred
• Who Was There
• Organizations And Documents Referenced
• The complete report: 2,010 words

Source: the Park Commission meeting of October 26, 2026, reported from the official video recording and transcript.

Checked against the record: before publication this article was automatically compared with the meeting transcript.