State Representative Wes Virdell recently invited all 181 members of the Texas Legislature to visit the Kerrville area and Camp Mystic to see for themselves where 119 people died in the July 4th floods. He offered two dates. Three legislators accepted.
The other 178 had something better to do.
Virdell represents House District 53, which includes Kerr County and Camp Mystic. He serves on the Select Committee on Disaster Preparedness & Flooding. In a public social media post, he called out his colleagues for their absence and questioned the seriousness of a Legislature that passed sweeping regulation of the disaster without visiting the disaster itself.
“It is important that legislators see what really happened because the Texas House and Senate recently passed legislation that was a massive overreach of government as a reaction to it,” Virdell wrote.
The numbers tell the story of what the Legislature responded to. On July 4th, 2025, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes. The floodwaters killed at least 137 people across Central Texas, 119 of them in Kerr County. Twenty-seven campers and counselors died at Camp Mystic, most of them children who were asleep in their cabins. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in Texas history.
The Legislature convened a second special session in August and passed SB 1, the Heaven’s 27 Camp Safety Act. The bill restricts state licensing of youth camps with cabins in floodplains, mandates evacuation when flood warnings are issued, and requires weather alert systems and annual emergency training for all camps. The total legislative package included nearly $300 million in flood preparedness spending.
Virdell voted against portions of the package. He has said publicly that he offered amendments to narrow the camp safety bill to address actual flood risk rather than blanketing the entire youth camp industry. Those amendments failed. He has since stated that the bill was “directly targeted at shutting Camp Mystic down” and driven by political influencers behind the scenes.
The Legislature also created joint investigating committees. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wrote to the Department of State Health Services in February asking the agency to deny Camp Mystic’s license renewal until investigations are complete.
All of that happened without 178 of the 181 people who voted on it ever setting foot in the disaster zone.
Virdell put the absenteeism in terms his colleagues would understand. “If a member of the Texas Legislature gets invited to a professional or college football game, most members will drop everything to find a way to make it,” he wrote. Football games pack the calendar. Understanding why 119 Texans died does not.
This is a familiar pattern for anyone who watches the Texas Legislature operate. Members pass laws based on headlines, political pressure, and emotional momentum. The actual substance of the problem, the terrain, the facts on the ground, the unintended consequences of broad regulatory mandates: these get sorted out later, if they get sorted out at all. Usually, they don’t.
Virdell did not identify the three legislators who accepted his invitation.
