@dimabytes its not clear what the issue is here. The initial arguments are the starting values for properties of the components; so in the example you give the component labelled dropdown-color has a property value whose initial value will be green.
If you want to set the value of something outside of one of the components, then the best way would be to change your code to get the value through a component; a hidden div is useful for this. One useful approach is for this component content to contain enough information to then fetch content using the ORM.