requested a special session<\/a> in a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott signed by several colleagues.<\/p>\nWalker isn\u2019t expecting to see action out of the legislature anytime soon.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes a lot of political courage to say, ‘we\u2019re gonna bring this back up and talk it out further.’ I hope they\u2019ll do it, because the point is camper safety,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
According to the Department of State Health Services, many camps with pending applications have received notice of deficiency letters from the state detailing changes they need to make to their emergency action plans.<\/p>\n
\u201cCamps who receive the NOD letter are given 45 days from the time they received the letter to bring their emergency plans into compliance with the new requirements,\u201d DSHS spokesperson Lara Anton said in a statement. \u201cDSHS is concurrently conducting pre-licensure inspections so that licenses can be issued as soon as a camp has met the requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Youth camps can continue operating while their application status is pending,” Anton said.<\/p>\n
But Walker said he believes some camps will close over the new standards.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t overcome a bid of a million dollars for a small camp just to get a fiber line to your camp,\u201d he said. \u201cAbsolutely, we\u2019ll lose some camps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Walker and his wife, Sarah, spent their careers in ministry and at camps.<\/p>\n
Eddie was a camper at Mt. Lebanon from the time he was 11 years old. He and his met there as counselors.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is where I began my walk with the Lord. It determined who I married, what job I did. It shaped my life,\u201d Walker said. \u201cIt is everything good about what it means to be a child and how to grow into a man or a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
Walker didn’t sleep last year after the tragedy at Camp Mystic. \u00a0He immediately began reviewing safety procedures, long before the state required it.<\/p>\n
The camp\u2019s emergency action plan went from 5 pages long to 45.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can tell you this is a safe and good place, and your kids need to come here and we\u2019re going to take good care of them as though they are our own kids and grandkids,\u201d Sarah said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The state has approved just nine camp licenses. More than 300 applications remain pending three weeks before sessions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-279225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}