Colorado’s “free” school lunch program could finally be getting a well-deserved reality check, depending on what voters have to say about it come November.
Governor Polis recently signed two bills concerning the state’s Healthy School Meals for All program (HSMA): House Bill 25-1274, which essentially asks voters to both de-TABOR existing revenue as well as increase funding for the HSMA program through a tax hike, and Senate Bill 25-214, a contingency measure that scales back the program should voters reject the revenue hikes.
The HSMA program was flawed to begin with, and these new measures are simply attempts to cover for the legislature’s overpromising and overspending.
HSMA background
Prior the COVID pandemic, students whose parents earned under a certain threshold would be eligible for subsidized school lunches fully funded by the federal government. Other students would receive reduced-price lunches through a combination of federal and state taxpayer funding, while the rest would pay for their lunches with a small supplement from the federal government.
Then through the COVID-related spending spree, the federal government fully funded “free” school meals to all students during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years.
Because that federal funding was set to end before the 2022-2023 school year, the legislature asked Coloradans to pass Proposition FF in 2022 to continue fully funding lunches for all school kids, regardless of family income. Voters obliged, passing the measure by a margin of 55%.
There’s no ‘free’ lunch
Prop FF had good, but badly misguided intentions, which led to critical shortcomings in the program.
To start, Prop FF only passed because the vast majority of Coloradans wouldn’t have to spend a dime out of their own pockets—that burden would fall to only the wealthiest Coloradans, those households making over $300,000 per year, which amounts to around 113,000 (or just 5 percent) of state tax filers.
Nothing speaks more to the current state of Colorado politics than forcing a few at gunpoint to bear costs for the many.
Adding insult to injury, Prop FF obligates that 5 percent of taxpayers pay for all school meals, even for students whose parents earn well above the pre-COVID threshold.
Predictably, the program’s utilization skyrocketed beyond the initial estimates when parents realized they could push the cost of feeding their kids at school onto the state.
Initially, HSMA was expected to cost no more than $100 million per year once fully operational. Instead, the program quickly saw a budget shortfall of approximately $56 million, which lawmakers chose to cover temporarily, with the actual cost of the program closer to $162 million.
Similarly sized funding deficits were only expected to continue, which led to the introduction and passage of the two 2025 bills.
A second bite at the apple
The state grossly misrepresented the cost of the HSMA program to voters and needlessly created a new special interest group of increasingly dependent parents.
Now, the legislature hopes to duck accountability via HB 1274, which actually puts two referred measures on the 2025 ballot:
The first proposition will ask voters to allow the state to retain excess revenue from the initial Proposition FF estimate that would otherwise be returned to taxpayers as required by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, otherwise known as de-TABORing.
The second proposition aims to further reduce deductions on taxable income for the same wealthy Coloradans already footing the bill (thus raising their tax burden) to increase funding for HSMA by an additional $95 million per year. In other words, it’s a second bite at the tax-the-rich apple.
SB 214, the second HSMA bill signed by Polis, acts as a contingency in the event Colorado voters wise up to the legislature’s scheme and reject the measures, scaling back the program to again tie subsidized school lunches to actual need.
At the end of the day, legislators are scrambling to fix a problem of their own making, looking to pass the buck on to a minority of Coloradans and assuming the majority of voters won’t dig too deeply into the details.
Let’s hope Colorado voters wise up to the scheme this time around.
