Texas Spent $5 Million to Fix Camp Safety. It Has 100 Fewer Licensed Camps.

On July 4, 2025, floodwater on the Guadalupe River killed 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic in Kerr County.▸ Two months later, Governor Abbott signed House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 1 into law — the Youth CAMPER Act and the Heaven's 27 Camp Safety Act, named for the victims — rewriting how Texas regulates the roughly 375 youth camps it licensed at the time. The Legislative Budget Board's fiscal note put a price on the fix: $5.08 million and 16 new state positions. A year later, the Texas Department of State Health Services' own roster shows 100 fewer camps hold a license than did a month after the flood.

Before the flood, Texas had no dedicated youth-camp inspection staff.▸ Per DSHS's own presentation to the House Committee on Culture, Recreation and Tourism, "all retail food inspectors (40 in total) flex from retail foods duties and provide some level of support to youth camp inspections during summer months" — and camp license fees covered only about half the program's cost, with general revenue making up the rest. HB 1's fiscal note authorized 16 new full-time positions — 10 Sanitarian IIs, 1 Sanitarian IV, and 5 Emergency Management Program Coordinator IIIs — and appropriated $2,594,265 from the Economic Stabilization Fund for FY2026 plus $2,484,726 in general revenue for FY2027, for a combined $5,078,991.

The fiscal note is explicit that this isn't new permanent funding: the Legislature required DSHS to raise camp license fees "as necessary to recover the costs of the appropriations."▸ The state fronted $5.08 million to build the new inspection and plan-review apparatus, then wrote the law so camps pay it back dollar for dollar.

DSHS's October 2025 rule-update presentation laid out the fee increase needed to hit that recovery target.▸ The adopted structure, reported by the Texas Tribune from DSHS's rule effective February 2026, raised the smallest day camp's annual renewal fee more than fourteenfold and the largest camps' more than sevenfold — and, because the law charges by site, multi-location operators now pay it once per location.

The mandate that drew the sharpest reaction wasn't a fee, though — it was a wiring requirement.▸ The new law required camps to run end-to-end fiber internet, so remote sites could reach emergency services during a disaster. Nineteen camps sued the state over it, arguing fiber simply doesn't reach their land. Camp Oak Haven, near Columbus, didn't wait for the lawsuit to resolve: it permanently closed in March 2026 after getting a fiber quote of $280,000 — in the words of former director Riley Watkins, "three times the camp's annual budget." DSHS later agreed to let camps with redundant non-fiber internet keep operating for the 2026 season while the fiber fight continues, but not before some camps shut down or scaled back to duck the licensing threshold entirely.

DSHS also paused issuing new licenses altogether from October 2025 until the rules were finalized in January 2026, then required every camp to resubmit an emergency plan for review by a state-hired contractor, National EMR.▸ The backlog that produced shows up in the state's own roster, checked at four points since the flood:

The decline isn't camps quietly closing at a steady background rate — it's the relicensing process itself outrunning the camps trying to get through it.▸ As of April 24, 2026, only 3 of the 363 camps on the roster had a license approved under the new rules; the rest were either mid-review or still running out old licenses that hadn't yet expired. By May 18, only 47 approvals were specifically for the 2026 season, and a week earlier, Click2Houston/KPRC counted just 18 camps statewide holding a license actually issued under the new emergency-plan rules — weeks before a Texas summer camp season that, in most years, is already underway.

Figures track DSHS's Youth Camp Program specifically — day and residential camps licensed under Health and Safety Code Chapter 141 — and don't include the separate flood-warning-siren grants Senate Bill 3 sent directly to counties, which fund a different part of the state's post-Mystic response.