The Montezuma County commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday not to have the county sponsor and seek a grant for a summer lunch program for local children.
Chair Jim Candelaria said the program should be taken on by the schools.
Last week, the assistant director of the county public health department, Laurel Schafer, told the commissioners the health department had been approached about sponsoring the program, which would provide five days’ worth of lunches every week for up to 425 children in Montezuma and Dolores counties. Schafer said the meals would be distributed for pickup at Good Sam’s Food Pantry in Cortez for nine weeks.
The commissioners said then that they needed time to research the matter, postponing their decision until this week.
During public comment at Tuesday’s commission meeting, Cortez resident Mary Dodd urged the board to approve the sponsorship.
Dodd said in one local school district, 60 percent of the children qualify for free or reduced meals.
“Children who experience food insecurity over the summer show measurable declines in physical and mental health and academic readiness by the fall,” she said. “They are more likely to require medical attention. They are more likely to fall behind and stay behind. The costs to families, to schools, and to our county compound over time.”
She said the grant would not create a dependency. “It prevents the kind of crisis that does create long-term dependency on emergency services, on medical care, and on remedial education,” she said.
But when the commissioners took up the matter later, they voiced numerous concerns.
Commissioner Kent Lindsay said he’d made phone calls and done some research. He spoke about Colorado’s SEARS program, which provided emergency food assistance during the COVID pandemic, saying the state had run out of those funds and is now looking to move the program elsewhere.
Lindsay said he had been “talking to people who had worked in those kitchens, and waste in those kitchens was reaching proportions of 65-70 percent. They were required to cook so many meals each day and it wasn’t being taken advantage of and all that food was going in the trash.
“I look at this and I look at our depleting revenues,” Lindsay said. “If this grant were to fail, we couldn’t absorb this into our system, so rather than start a program and not have it there to be counted on, I cannot support this at this time.”
Candelaria said his understanding was that “this is a program the school district is wanting to shift to the county.”
Last week, Schafer said she believed that District Re-1 was intending to do a program in 2026, but it would require people to eat meals onsite rather than pick them up, and it would not serve children in ninth through 12th grades, only younger children. The proposed program the county might sponsor would serve children through age 18, she told the board last week.
She said the county health department would be working with the Colorado Department of Education, the Montezuma County Good Food Collective, Good Sam’s, and the Reaching Our Community Kids group in Dove Creek. The county’s role would be administrative, she said.
According to the state Department of Education’s website, the Summer Food Service Program “provides free breakfast, lunch, snack and/or supper to youth in Colorado all summer long” and sponsoring organizations can be local, municipal, county or state governments as well as other entities. Potential sponsors have to apply by April 15.
County Administrator Travis Anderson said he had tried getting hold of someone with the schools for more information, but had never gotten a response.
“I’m going to put this right back on the schools,” Candelaria said, “because the schools need to need to step up and do what they’re supposed to be doing. . . . We can’t take on something that might or might not be successful.
“I agree with Commissioner Lindsay. I would ask the schools to step up. I think this is not in our lane.”
Lindsay said when the county health department speaks of food safety, “that means quality of food, not that we’re going to go out there and ensure that everybody has something to eat.”
Commissioner Gerald Koppenhafer said people who receive SNAP benefits are given a supplement to feed their children through the summer.
“We’re already doing something for those children,” Koppenhafer said. “We don’t any of us up here want kids to go hungry.”
“I think this is a school-district issue and it’s not our issue,” Candelaria said. “I would have liked to have a conversation with the school district, but we can’t even get ahold of them.”
The board then voted 3-0 not to pursue the summer food grant proposal.
