Advertising Hits Arizona County Government Website

Combuchan writes "Just when you thought that pages on your local government's website were the last bastion of the advertisement-free WWW, that may soon change. Maricopa County (seen on slashdot before), home to 3.4 million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has seen their GIS website "become an every day tool for realtors, developers, mortgage and title companies, appraisers, inspectors, attorneys and many other professionals associated with the real estate industry." As a result, they are now accepting bids for Web advertisements. As the county is one of the best-run in the nation, this could set quite the precedent."

Comments

Re:Ha ha hee hee ho that's a good one.

[Jeffrey Baker]

Yes, I am painfully aware of the agriculture practiced in Arizona. My tax dollars are subsidizing it to the tune of about $1000 per dollar of produced crop, mostly in the form of water projects.

Here's some stats for you on Maricopa County's water supply. The basins and aquifers contain about 175 million acre-feet of water. This is the bit the county has rights to. The county's water use is over 2 million acre-feet per year. The groundwater recharge rate is a pathetic 150,000 acre-feet per year, on average. The aquifer will be depleted in 60 years, according to Maricopa County's own, very optimistic estimates.

Now, riddle me this. Is it wise to invest in real estate in an area that will have pissed away its water supply in less than a century?

Furthermore I'd like to point out that much of Maricopa's and Arizona's surface water supply, for the bastardization of agriculture they tend to practice in that region, is piped in from the Colorado River, which aquatic system had to be ruined to support ambitious Arizona land owners, at the expense of everyone else.

Here's a nice book to read: Cadilalc Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water