Two ballot measures that will determine the fate of Colorado’s universal school meals program hang in the balance in Tuesday’s election.
Propositions LL and MM, if both pass, would direct tens of millions of dollars in new funding to Healthy School Meals for All, which was approved by voters in 2022 to feed all students across the state. While the program distributed more than 24 million new meals in just its first year, it has proved more costly than supporters initially believed.
Proponents have warned that, should both measures fail, the program may be curtailed and provide universal meals only to low-income schools.
Prop. LL would allow the meals program to keep money it’s already collected. Under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the state must estimate how much money it needs to retain to fund a program. But the program has run beyond those estimates, collecting more than anticipated — meaning that the state would have to refund the excess tax dollars, which it needs for school meals. Based on past returns, keeping the money would mean $12.4 million more for the program.
Prop. MM aims to provide more funding for the program by increasing taxes paid by individuals making more than $300,000 annually. It’s estimated that MM, by significantly lowering the amount those taxpayers can deduct from their income for state taxes, would raise $95 million per year for school meals.
In August, legislators amended the measure’s language so that any excess money would go toward paying for food assistance in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, given recently approved federal cutbacks.
The proposals have been backed by Democratic lawmakers, school districts and a broad swath of advocacy groups, who’ve said the program had succeeded at its core mission of providing free meals to students across the state. The “Keep Kids Fed Colorado” campaign, which is supporting LL and MM, has spent $645,000, out of nearly $740,000 raised, as of Tuesday afternoon.
The money that Props. LL and MM would raise, proponents have said, is sorely needed to support a program that’s doled out millions of meals in its first years. Under Proposition FF, the 2022 ballot measure that created the program, the state provided 8 million more breakfasts and 16 million more lunches in the 2023-24 school year than in the prior year, according to state data.
But the program has also proved more costly than initially anticipated, prompting legislators to send LL and MM to the voters.
The measures have been opposed by Republicans, including the Colorado GOP, and the Independence Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, which has castigated the program as a financially unsound failure. Still, LL and MM’s opponents haven’t mounted much of a unified campaign: Their spending committee raised almost nothing — $1,000 — and had spent none of it by Tuesday.
Prop. MM, if it passes, also would help avoid deeper blows to the state budget. The tax-and-spending bill signed by President Donald Trump in July shifts significant new SNAP costs onto states, and the amended ballot language is lawmakers’ attempt to blunt the impact of that change on both state coffers and on the families who use SNAP.
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