Squander your water like this and don't ask for ours

In Arizona, a developer is planning to create a 125-acre water park in the middle of the desert. What's particularly galling about this is two-fold: 1) This adds to the massive number of golf courses which waste water, throwing it up into the atmosphere instead of using it for drinking water, crop irrigation, or erosion management; 2) Arizona's congressional representation have a long history of pushing for "nationalizing" water resources, code-works for diverting water from the Great Lakes to Arizona.

Thankfully, the representation of the Great Lakes states have been very clear about opposing diversion of Great Lakes water; however, a time may come in the future where this sort of ridiculous waste will lead the rest of the nation to divert water from the upper-Midwest to the rest of the nation. We must immediately move to make this legal.

Huge Water Park Planned for Ariz. Desert
Developers Plan Massive Water Park in Arizona Desert; Project Would Use 100M Gallons a Year
ABC News

MESA, Ariz. (AP) - By tapping rivers and sucking water from deep underground, developers have covered Arizona with carpets of Bermuda grass and dotted the parched landscape with swimming pools, golf courses and lakeshore homes.

Now another ambitious project is in the works: A massive new water park that would offer surf-sized waves, snorkeling, scuba diving and kayaking - all in a bone-dry region that gets just 8 inches of rain a year.

"It's about delivering a sport that's not typically available in an urban environment," said Richard Mladick, a Mesa real-estate developer who persuaded business leaders in suburban Mesa to support the proposal called the Waveyard.

Artists' drawings of the park show surfers gliding through waves that crash onto a sandy beach and kayakers navigating the whitecaps of a wide, rolling river. Families watch the action from beneath picnic umbrellas. If constructed, the park would use as much as 100 million gallons of groundwater a year.

Mladick, 39, said he wanted to create the kind of lush environment he remembers from growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., and surfing in Morocco, Indonesia, Hawaii, and Brazil.

"I couldn't imagine raising my kids in an environment where they wouldn't have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about the same sports that I grew up being passionate about," he said.