Camp Mystic license fight

Dan Patrick is trying to stop Camp Mystic from reopening, and he is doing it in public. On April 7, the Texas lieutenant governor said he would “double down” on his demand that state health officials deny the camp a 2026 license while the Texas Rangers assist an investigation into complaints of neglect during the July 4, 2025 flood that killed 27 girls and counselors at the camp. State regulators confirmed that they are investigating hundreds of complaints, and the Department of Public Safety said the Rangers are now helping with that probe (ksat.com, sfgate.com). That escalation matters because Camp Mystic is not asking to reopen the part of camp that flooded. It wants to run summer 2026 sessions at Cypress Lake, a separate nearby property on higher ground that the camp says was not significantly damaged. Camp Mystic announced that plan in September and later said the Cypress Lake site would follow Texas’s new camp safety rules and add its own upgrades, including river monitoring and stronger communications systems (texastribune.org, fox7austin.com). By early April, that plan had become concrete. Camp Mystic submitted its renewal application to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which licenses youth camps, and state records showed its prior license had expired on March 31, 2026. The camp has argued there is “no regulatory basis” to block Cypress Lake because it is a separate property and because it complies with the new law. DSHS has not said whether it will grant the application (kxan.com, khou.com). Patrick started pushing against that long before the Rangers appeared. On February 23, he sent DSHS Commissioner Jennifer Shuford a letter asking her not to renew Camp Mystic’s license until legislative investigations were complete and “necessary corrective actions” were taken. He argued that letting the camp return to business would be “naive” before the state knows more about what happened that night. Camp Mystic answered that the Cypress Lake site met the law and invited Texas leaders to visit (kxan.com, cbsaustin.com). The fight over the license sits on top of a deeper accusation. Families of some of the girls who died have sued both the camp and state officials. One federal lawsuit filed in February says Texas regulators licensed Camp Mystic without ensuring it had the evacuation plan required by state law. The complaint says the camp’s emergency instructions told girls to stay in their cabins during floods instead of evacuating. DSHS has not commented on the pending case, but the suit turned the licensing fight into something larger than one camp’s reopening date. It became a test of whether Texas’s youth-camp oversight system did anything meaningful before the flood, or only afterward, when 27 people were already dead (usnews.com, click2houston.com). That is why Patrick’s latest move lands so hard. He is not changing the law. He is leaning on the agency that controls the license while a criminal investigation is still undefined in public. Texas law gives DSHS the formal authority to decide whether Camp Mystic can operate, but the lieutenant governor is making clear that a camp’s future can turn on political force as much as on any checklist. More than 850 families had already signed up to return if part of the camp reopened, even as the state said it had been receiving complaints since early February (sfgate.com, khou.com).