Montezuma Commissioners Reject Summer Meal Program Serving Dolores County Children

Seventy-five Dolores County children stand to lose 45 summer lunches apiece after the Montezuma County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously April 7 to reject a grant-funded take-home meal program that would have run nine weeks this summer.

County Public Health Assistant Director Laurel Schafer had brought the noncongregate feeding model through prior workshops: families would sign up and pick up one box per week containing five lunches for their children. Across both counties, the program projected serving roughly 425 children. In Dolores County, distribution was to run through Reaching Our Community Kids (ROCK), the Dolores-based nonprofit, while Good Sam's Food Pantry in Cortez would serve as a pickup point for Montezuma County families. The Colorado Department of Education's child nutrition office would have processed meal reimbursements back to the county as administrative sponsor.

The unanimous vote against sponsorship rested on three interlocked concerns. Commissioners worried that if grant funding fell short, county revenues would absorb the loss. They questioned whether the public health office had enough staff to manage a complex vendor-payment and reimbursement system. And they challenged the fundamental premise that county government should administer a feeding program at all. Commissioner Jim Candelaria made that last point explicit, saying he wanted to "put this right back on the schools." Commissioner Kent Lindsay pointed to prior programs he said had generated large amounts of wasted food when daily meal quotas went unclaimed.

The county was asked to take on the sponsor role specifically because local partners, including ROCK, said they lacked the capacity to manage reimbursement paperwork and the cash-flow requirements tied to federal nutrition funding. That gap left county public health as the only viable administrative option. The commissioners' rejection closes that door without opening another.

For Dolores County families who would have qualified, the most accessible remaining options before summer begins are school-based congregate meal programs, which operate differently from the take-home box model but remain federally funded. The Dolores School District could pursue its own sponsorship arrangement or partner with a direct-service contractor willing to absorb the reimbursement complexity the county declined. ROCK's continued engagement will be decisive; as a distribution partner without sponsor status, the organization's path forward depends entirely on finding a fiscal agent with the administrative capacity commissioners concluded the county does not have.