A year and four days after the Hill Country floods killed dozens of campers and counselors, the state officials who now license Texas youth camps told senators Wednesday that the new safety law has teeth. Every emergency plan submitted under it was rejected at least once before approval, every camp drew a pre-licensure inspection, and the number of licensed camps fell from about 375 last year to 307 today.
“This is the broad camp reform and licensure regulation bill,” Chair Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, said as the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services took up its monitoring charge. “This legislation was created after the devastating events in Kerr County… So, July the 4th. So a year and four days ago, we remember, and pray for all the families impacted.”
Dr. Timothy Stevenson of the Department of State Health Services — teased by the chair for briefly slipping out of the hearing room (“I saw that blank chair, and I was like, can somebody text him?”) — walked the committee through the first camp season under Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 1 of the second called session.
“We’re in the middle of, halfway through camp season for this summer,” he said. Of roughly 375 camps operating in 2025, “307 camps have renewed and have licenses as of the last day or two,” with applications still trickling in — one arrived July 1 — though most came before the law’s March 31 deadline.
The plan reviews were not a rubber stamp. “Every single plan that was submitted, not a single one was approved the first time,” Stevenson testified. “So they were all reviewed at least twice.” The agency hired staff with emergency-management expertise, retrained inspectors on the new statutory requirements and contracted with an outside emergency-management firm to review plans, he said, and emergency plans are now shared with the Texas Division of Emergency Management and local responders.
Where the agency once skipped pre-licensure inspections for returning camps, “this year every single camp got a pre-licensure inspection,” he said — some 300 camps were inspected twice, once before licensure and again in operation, with “approximately three camps left” awaiting operational inspections expected the week of July 20.
Kolkhorst pressed Stevenson for his wish list ahead of the next session. “Today we’re asking questions. It’s the interim, right? What would you recommend?” His first answer: “some clear guidance” on the line between day camps and overnight camps, since some day camps keep campers overnight a night or two a season — a gap between the statute’s categories and how camps actually operate.
The camp review anchored a monitoring block that opened with the Department of Family and Protective Services abuse-and-neglect central registry — the state’s database of people found to have harmed children. DFPS Commissioner Audrey O’Neill, who told the committee she was deputy commissioner when lawmakers filed “a number of bills… highlighting interest and concern in this central registry and in expanding due process,” said the agency spent the interim building proposals “to strengthen due process for consideration by the legislature.”
She said those proposals included a removal-review process she stressed is “completely separate from the opportunity to seek due process,” and which will exclude family investigations because those findings have not exhausted appeals. Kolkhorst signaled the issue is live for 2027, raising people flagged in the database “which I’m not sure we’re even sure they knew that they were on the registry. So I look forward to working with you.”
The block closed with House Bill 3595, the 2025 law setting emergency-readiness standards — including temperature regulation during power outages — for assisted-living facilities. Michelle Dionne-Vahalik of the Health and Human Services Commission’s long-term care regulation division laid out the timeline: the law took effect Sept. 1, 2025, with most requirements — led by a contingency plan for keeping residents safe in an outage — binding on Jan. 1, 2026.
HHSC told providers to notify regional offices of problems during emergencies, she said, and the agency runs call-downs “to every single provider that could be in the impact zone” before, during and after a disaster. An industry witness later urged senators to preserve the law’s flexibility for residential campuses serving Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities: “a one size fits all mandate does not work well,” he said, asking the committee to back “agency guidance that judges emergency plans based on the achievement of desired outcomes.”
No votes were taken at the interim hearing, but the direction of travel was clear on all three fronts: statutory cleanup on the day-camp definition, a due-process package for the central registry, and continued flexibility-versus-enforcement calibration on assisted-living readiness — all queued for the 90th Legislature in January 2027. The committee’s work follows a heavy week for the panel, which heard sheriffs describe jails as the state’s default mental hospitals and built a public-health case against THC just one day earlier, as we previously reported.
Also at the hearing
The committee spent its longest block — about two hours and 16 minutes of invited testimony plus most of the public-comment line — on its charge to combat exploitation of the surrogacy and fertility industries, hearing a former surrogate describe an international custody battle and the chair describe newborns “immediately jetted off to China.”