Good luck this summer, parents.
After almost 20 years of bouncing from campground to campground, Orr Family Ministries finally found its home in 2022 on a 12-acre tree-filled campground located on a hill in Colorado County.
Kids played in the swimming pool, worshipped by the fire pit, and watched the sunset over the hill while learning about Bible stories.
They called it Camp Oak Haven, providing refuge for about 100 children from surrounding low-income and rural communities.
But, this summer, Camp Oak Haven won’t be reopening. Orr Family Ministries has sold the land because it could not meet sweeping regulations the state abruptly placed on the camp industry.
“We are sad. It’s terrible. We had church groups coming, and we had to give back deposits, and I don’t know where those kids will go,” said Cynthia Royal, Orr Family Ministries board president. “The dent is in these rural communities where kids or parents don’t have huge incomes to send them to a huge mega camp miles away.”
After the deadly July 4 Hill Country floods that killed 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, Texas lawmakers required youth camps to implement a slew of new safety requirements, including weather warning systems and having fiber optic internet, and pay thousands of dollars more in licensing fees.
While the state has pulled back on the internet requirement for now, the regulations have shaken up the industry, according to multiple camp directors. Previously licensed camps have reduced their hours of operation, so the state no longer has to license them and they can avoid paying higher licensing fees. Urban camps are scaling back activities for children due to burdensome safety plan requirements, and rural camps are closing due to uncertainty.
Families are also impacted. Many of Camp Oak Haven’s are low-income or work and need daytime care and enrichment for their children during the summer months. Some are still scrambling to find other options after camp officials announced the closure at the end of March.
The state does not track the number of camps that have closed since the new requirements went into effect. But compared to the list of active Texas camps in December, 66 camps no longer appear on the most recent roster updated Friday. It’s not clear how many of those closed because of the regulations or if they’ve scaled back operations so the state doesn’t need to license them.
There are currently 316 camps licensed by the state and the state has approved 47 applications to operate this summer, but most of the rest can still open because their licenses haven’t expired yet or their applications are pending.
“We told them this would happen, but they didn’t listen to any of us,” Royal said about camps closing. “Lawmakers threw out a blanket rule for all camps across the entire state without taking realistic things into consideration. How far away from water are you? How urban are you? How rural are you? None of that was considered.”
There’s more, so read the rest. The issues of this new law affected rural camps, for whom the cost of fiber-optic internet was excessive, and urban camps, who were now subject to requirements about exits in cabins, because as the president of Kidventure, which operates camps at both the elementary and middle schools my kids went to, said, the state “attempted to create safety rules for the situation with Camp Mystic but applied them to all camps”.
One of the themes of the various Republicans running for election or re-election is that they’re needed to fix the state’s problems. Which would be funny, considering that Republicans have had full control of state government for over 20 years now, if the state GOP hadn’t taken such a rancid, authoritarian turn lately. If you want an example of what this means for regular folks, look at this legislation, which passed in a top-priority bill from one of the special sessions last year. Look at the photo in this story, where Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick are holding up the bill Abbott just signed so they could bask in the glory of it all. You wouldn’t bring in the arsonist to put out the fire. Why would you bring back the guys who broke things on a promise of fixing them?