4 November 6 - 12, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Washed Away After the Camp Mystic tragedy, new Texas laws could shut down beloved summer camps. BY EMMA RUBY S ummer camp directors were blindsided in September when of- ficials with the state’s health ser- vices 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 ses- sion 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 fa- vor of stricter regulations for things like weather alerts, employee emergency train- ing 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 spectacu- larly. 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 serv- ing 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 execu- tive director of Lake Lavon Camp & Confer- ence Center in Princeton, believes that one of the weaknesses of the new laws is that they treat camps as cookie-cutter institu- tions. “Every camp leader in the state wants to provide a safe experience for kids, and we’re all just heartbroken over what hap- pened 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 Ob- server. “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 dol- lars. 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 sum- mer. That cumulative total caused the North Texas camp to be lumped together with legacy summer camps like Mystic un- der 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 La- von 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 ex- perience 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.” | UNFAIR PARK | Brandon Bell/Getty Images >> p6 Camp Mystic after the flash flooding in July 2025.
