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Summer camp directors were blindsided last month when officials with the state’s health services department unveiled a series of regulations intended to increase camper safety, but which camp operators say will come at a steep cost.
The new guidelines were approved by the Texas Legislature during a special session this summer in honor of the 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic who died on July 4 during flooding in Texas’ Hill Country. Parents of the victims formed a group called Heaven’s 27 that lobbied in favor of stricter regulations for things like weather alerts, employee emergency training and building in floodplains. The group criticized Camp Mystic’s plan to reopen in 2026 and said that while a natural disaster caused the summer flooding, human error contributed to the loss of life.
“When the water rose, those responsible for more than 700 children failed spectacularly. Their failure cost our daughters their lives,” testified Michael McCown, whose 8-year-old daughter Linne was killed in the Camp Mystic flood. “These laws are not meant for camps. They’re for the families who trust them. … The financial burden they fear is nothing compared to the human cost my family has paid.”
Among the changes coming to camps in summer 2026 are steeper registration fees with the state. Overnight camps previously had to pay a few hundred dollars annually to register with authorities; now, camps serving more than 500 children in a summer will be billed $10,500. Fees for day camps have gone from $250 to $3,200.
The high fees were designed to help the state pay for the regulatory oversight needed to enact the laws Heaven’s 27 lobbied for. The camp industry, though, often runs on slim margins. Some directors have warned state officials that the difference in fees could snuff out their summer before the next season arrives. Gary Sirkel, the executive director of Lake Lavon Camp & Conference Center in Princeton, believes that one of the weaknesses of the new laws is that they treat camps as cookie-cutter institutions.
“Every camp leader in the state wants to provide a safe experience for kids, and we’re all just heartbroken over what happened at Camp Mystic. But there’s a vast difference between all the types of camps across this state. We’re a very different camp from [Mystic],” Sirkel told the Observer. “These laws were written and passed and signed into law in three weeks’ time, so as a result, there’s a lot of stuff in there that [doesn’t apply to us], and some camps are probably going to have to shut down.”
Sirkel said he has heard from at least one camp leader since the Oct. 10 hearing who believes their camp will have to shutter.
Camp Mystic spans 700 acres in Texas’ Hill Country and, according to the Texas Tribune, had served 750 girls before the flooding in early July. Sessions at Mystic last for a few weeks and cost thousands of dollars. The camp’s Christian values are one of the similarities it shares with Lake Lavon Camp.
Lake Lavon Camp hosts around 350 children in a day, but short session lengths ranging between one night and a week mean the camp sees thousands in a summer. That cumulative total caused the North Texas camp to be lumped together with legacy summer camps like Mystic under the state’s definition of “extra-large” operations, although Sirkel said his camp’s financial position is significantly different.
According to the Washington Post, a four-week term at Camp Mystic costs around $7,600. Another legacy camp, Camp Longhorn, costs $6,164 for a three-week term; an eight-week summer at Heart O’ the Hills, a girls camp just 2 miles upriver from Mystic, is nearly $13,000. The most expensive program at Lake Lavon Camp, on the other hand, is $225 for four nights.
“If they can’t manage the $225, we tell them to come anyway, we’ll figure it out. We do everything we can to keep the camp experience accessible to all these kids,” Sirkel said. “And so I don’t want to just knee-jerk say, OK, we’ll just pass all this cost on to them. Because that goes against what we’re trying to do.”
Keeping Kids Out of Floodplains
Investigations published after the July 4 flood show that camp directors and regulatory officials knew that a number of cabins at Camp Mystic sat within a high-risk floodplain. According to the Texas Tribune, the Federal Emergency Management Agency included the camp in its 2011 “Special Flood Hazard Area” map that warns of areas likely to be affected by a 100-year flood. (A 100-year flooding event is one that has a 1% chance of occurring each year.)
Camp Mystic appealed the map, and in 2013, FEMA removed 15 buildings from the floodplain area. The amended buildings are part of the camp’s Cypress Lake campus, which was not badly damaged by the flooding. The cabins of those who died were located in a floodway of the Guadalupe River, an area considered even more hazardous than a 100-year floodplain.
Some groups have used that fact, coupled with the amended FEMA map, as evidence that Camp Mystic knowingly endangered campers and state agencies allowed it to do so.
The new laws require youth camps to move overnight accommodations out of floodplains, something that Sirkel said the Princeton camp got “really lucky” with. While the camp sits adjacent to a large floodplain, a survey of the property that was conducted three years ago found that no part of the Lake Lavon camp is at risk of flooding. There are also regulations for building within a controlled floodplain, which is defined as being next to a “lake, pond or other still body of water that is not connected to a stream, river or other watercourse” or is dammed.
The extent of those regulations, though, is still being completed. One change is that camp operators will be required to install ladders that grant roof access onto cabins, which some camp operators told state officials seemed potentially even riskier than leaving campers within a cabin during a flood.
“I believe there’s a greater safety risk for this, for these new rules, than there would be without them,” Rhonda Roberts, the executive director of the Heart of Texas Camp in Brownwood, said during the hearing. “Our roofs are the last place that we want campers, and it’s not really a safe thing.”
The floodplain regulations have already resulted in closures at camps run by the Girl Scouts of the Texas-Oklahoma Plains. The organization runs three summer camps: Stevens Ranch in Nemo, Camp Timberlake in Azle, and Camp Kiwanis in Amarillo. While Timberlake is only open for day camps, Stevens Ranch and Kiwanis host overnight stays at various campsites. According to officials, at least two of the sites at Camp Kiwanis will have to close because they are located in a FEMA-designated floodplain.
Much of Camp Timberlake sits within a controlled floodplain, a Girl Scouts spokesperson said, but it’s unclear if any changes will be made to the camp because it operates only during the day.
“We are awaiting additional direction from the state. There are not yet sufficient state resources to answer clarifying questions about implementation and requirements,” Girl Scouts said in a statement.
Some camps have questioned the effectiveness of legislating based on FEMA floodplain designations. FEMA’s flood-map program was developed in the 1970s to support the National Flood Insurance Program, but some experts have criticized the program as outdated because it does not consider heavy rainfall data as a predictor of flooding, despite rising global temperatures contributing to increased rainfall.
The maps also do not take into account hyper-specific geographic features, such as cabins being built on a bluff overlooking a water feature. Daran Miller, the executive director of Glen Lake Camps in Glen Rose, told state regulators that his camp has not flooded in its 86-year history despite being located in a floodplain. That should count for something, he urged.
“I’m sure when they enacted this bill, they never thought they would impact a camp like ours to the point of closure,” Miller said. “We believe it’s important to evaluate each camp based on its site-specific characteristics. Not all floodplains are the same.”
In Case of Emergency
One of the most contested requirements in the new laws is that camps install two broadband internet connections to increase the likelihood of weather alerts reaching a campus. At least one of those services must be connected via a fiber-optic network, something that remains rare in the state’s rural areas.
According to the Texas Consumer Association, 9 million Texans still lack access to broadband internet services. In areas where the necessary infrastructure is not in place, installing it can cost thousands of dollars per mile. Sirkel said his camp will likely face$ 80,000 bi obtain the necessary equipment to comply with the broadband law, by the law’s Sept. 1, 2027, deadline.
While Sirkel said he’d normally use this time of year to prepare for summer 2026, that feels challenging to do right now. State health officials have said they will consider the feedback given by camp leaders before completing the new youth camp regulations, and a final protocol will be issued by Jan. 1, 2026.
That will leave camp operators with only three months to get their camps and upgraded emergency plans up to code by the April 1 deadline. If they don’t comply with the new rules, they won’t be allowed to open.
“Right now, we’re doing the best we can. There are some things that we pretty much know what all that’s going to entail, so I’m talking with vendors and looking at the [price] differences, getting budgetary numbers together so we know what we’re looking at,” Sirkel said. “But I can’t really pull the trigger, so to speak, until we [get the state’s final] interpretation. We’re at their mercy on that.”
