The Gilbert surf park is dead. In May 2026, the Town of Gilbert and WhiteWater West Industries — the third developer to try — mutually agreed to terminate their lease. The 25-acre site near Queen Creek and Higley roads sits empty, and the town has no announced plan for what comes next.
If you live near Queen Creek and Higley, here is what you just lost
For seven years, residents in the southeast Gilbert and Queen Creek corridor were told a world-class surf park was coming to their backyard. It never broke ground. Now the site is vacant land with no reopening timeline, no replacement attraction, and no new developer in sight.
The original deal promised 180 jobs and a projected $317 million economic impact for Gilbert. The town also expected to collect between $450,000 and $750,000 every year for fifty years from profit-sharing — money designed to offset maintenance costs at the 272-acre Gilbert Regional Park next door. None of that materializes now.
If you were thinking about the Queen Creek and Higley area as a place to buy a home partly because of what was coming, that calculus has changed. A high-profile planned attraction has been replaced by a prolonged vacancy. How long that vacancy lasts depends on decisions the town has not yet made.
Meanwhile, your neighbors in Mesa are not waiting. Cannon Beach opened in October 2025 at Power and Warner roads. It has already drawn nearly a million visitors. That sales tax flows to Mesa, not Gilbert.
Seven years, three developers, zero waves: the complete timeline
The project started in February 2019. The Town of Gilbert signed a fifty-year lease with John McLaughlin, CEO of The Strand Resorts, for a $60 million water park on town-owned land adjacent to Gilbert Regional Park. Annual rent was set at $284,841.
The original target opening was August 2020. That slipped to summer 2021. Then, in fall 2021, The Strand developer failed to secure financing and sold the project to ACA Arizona, LLC, which renamed it Cactus Surf Park.
ACA Arizona brought in WhiteWater West Industries — a Canadian company based in Richmond, British Columbia — as the third and final developer. WhiteWater West planned to design, build, and operate the park entirely at its own cost, with zero taxpayer expense to Gilbert. The redesigned project targeted a sixty percent reduction in water use, bringing projected annual consumption down to roughly one hundred acre-feet.
Water was a persistent problem. Gilbert’s Bring Your Own Water policy requires heavy water users to source their own supply rather than draw on town-owned resources. The town describes the policy as ensuring “smart, sustainable growth.” After a community meeting at Perry High School on August 29, 2022, the developer agreed to cut projected water use from two hundred acre-feet to one hundred acre-feet, citing Arizona’s water supply situation. The Gilbert Town Council approved an updated timeline and reduced water credits at its May 2023 meeting.
By June 2024 — five years after the original announcement — no ground had been broken. The project was still in the town’s design-review process, and the developer’s website had reportedly disappeared. In May 2026, Gilbert and WhiteWater West agreed to walk away.
Why the water strategy mattered — and why it still wasn’t enough
Arizona’s drought pressure shaped every version of this project. Gilbert’s Bring Your Own Water policy meant the developer had to secure its own water rights rather than tap the town’s supply. The plan was to purchase recovered water credits through Gilbert’s potable water system instead of drawing on Arizona’s Colorado River allocation. That approach was meant to insulate the project from drought politics and keep it off the town’s water budget.
Even after the developer cut projected usage in half, the water question remained a friction point through multiple rounds of design review. The project never cleared that process.
What WhiteWater West was actually building — and what it has built elsewhere
WhiteWater West planned to install its Endless Surf wave technology at the Gilbert site. That same technology made its global commercial debut at O2 SURFTOWN MUC in Munich in August 2024. The opening drew more than fourteen thousand guests. The Munich venue uses thirty-four pneumatic caissons to generate programmable waves up to 2.1 meters high, and WhiteWater reported zero downtime and an average ninety percent occupancy rate through its first year of operation.
As of WhiteWater’s presentation at IAAPA Expo in November 2025, no Endless Surf lagoon had yet opened in the United States. The first U.S. installation is slated for The Point in Vero Beach, Florida. Had Gilbert’s park been built, it would have been the first Endless Surf venue in North America.
The twenty-five-acre question: what happens to the land now
The site is town-owned land entered from Queen Creek Road just west of Higley Road. Town spokeswoman Joanna Guzman says Gilbert is “exploring a range of options for the site and intends to seek community input before advancing any future proposal.” Beyond that statement, no timeline, no preferred alternative, and no new RFP has been announced.
Options the town could theoretically consider include expanding Gilbert Regional Park onto the parcel, issuing a new request for proposals to a different developer, or pursuing a different use entirely. The town has not publicly committed to any of those paths. What is clear: nothing moves forward until residents have a chance to weigh in.
Where Gilbert families can go right now
Arizona’s only operating surf park is Revel Surf at Cannon Beach in Mesa. The 2.2-acre lagoon features both a large traveling wave and a stationary rapid surf wave — described as the first facility in the world to combine both in one park. It also has a sandy beach, cliff diving, and a skate and pump track. The broader Cannon Beach development sits at Power and Warner roads in Mesa and has drawn nearly a million visitors since its October 2025 opening.
For families in southeast Gilbert, that is the nearest surf option right now. The drive from the Queen Creek and Higley area to Power and Warner roads in Mesa runs roughly thirty to forty minutes depending on traffic.
Mesa is also weighing a major aquatic investment of its own. The Eastmark Aquatic Complex in Mesa is headed toward an August 2026 public vote — details on what that project includes and what the vote means for East Valley families.
No announcement yet — here is what has to happen first
The town has committed to community input before any new proposal moves forward. What form that process takes — public meetings, an online survey, a formal RFP — has not been announced. The 25-acre parcel will remain part of the Gilbert Regional Park campus in the meantime.
Gilbert residents who want to weigh in on what happens to the site should watch for announcements from the Gilbert Parks and Recreation Department. No hearing date, no community meeting, and no new developer have been named as of the time this article was published.
