Quoting Hollis Robbins

Much of human history is the story of catastrophic agricultural losses. The invention of the silo in the nineteenth century reduced grain losses from 50% to just 2%. Silos transformed farming from a seasonal survival struggle into a year-round productive enterprise.…

Before silos, life was measured in losses. After silos, farmers stored grain during harvest-time price lows to sell during peak periods. Silos enabled year-round milk production. Silos enabled strategic grain reserves for communities, creating buffers against seasonal shortages. Rural economies stabilized as community grain elevators enabled everyone to work together.

The agricultural silo is in fact one of history’s most transformative innovations, solving the storage challenges that had given farmers a headache for millennia.

Hollis Robbins, You say ‘silo’ as if it were a bad thing…

I had no idea.

On Hobbies

black and white photo of two boys playing with model trains.

Walter Spangenberg, a student at Woodrow Wilson High School and his nine year-old brother on the model railroad in the attic workshop which Walter has fitted up. Esther Bubley, 1943, courtesy Library of Congress

I wonder what my life would be like if I’d stuck with model trains rather than taking up blogging. Probably less stressful.

The Colorado River “psst psst” scheme emerges into public view: the “Supply Driven” concept

Powerpoint slide with arrows and a line describing the "supply drive" concept of flows at Lee Ferry.

The potential path forward.

 

 

See note of correction/clarification below:

Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.

The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado River’s estimated “natural flow” at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.

Correction/clarification: It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basin’s business – one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin would have to cut users with pre post-Compact water rights, something that has forcefully been asserted to me since this blog was first posted the Upper Basin argues it has no ability to do. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.

But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.

The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulder’s Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and I’m told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzke’s reveal at yesterday’s meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldn’t be quite so hush-hush given, y’know, 40 million of us stakeholders.

The full slide deck from the Colorado River C-SPAN Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamation’s Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest “min probable” forecast (hilarious typo – “min problem” now corrected) showing the system tanking – dropping below minimum power pool at Powell – in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)

We don’t have a lot of time here.

Agave season

A blooming agave stalk rises from the plant's spiky based, with a lawn and hous to the right, a sidewalk and street to the left, and trees in the distance.

Agave parryi (I think)

It’s that time of year when the family collects agave sightings around our Albuquerque neighborhood, detouring our drives and walks and bike rides to follow their progress, sharing locations and pictures whenever we’re out and about.

This one greeted me this morning as I was returning from my first tentative bike ride in a week (bad case of the crud). I looped around when I saw it, up on the sidewalk to better catch the morning sun, talked to one of the neighborhood walkers who said she’d been watching its florescence on her ambles, texted the results to L.

I’m not an expert (help out in the comments if you’ve got the knowledge), but I’m pretty sure this one is Agave parryi, commonly known as Parry’s Agave, which is common in Albuquerque gardens. The parryi variant, native from Arizona to west Texas, and south into Chihuahua and Sonora, is one of several hundred agaves – maybe 340? – that started their journey in the semi-arid Americas.

Along the way, we humans gave them a lot of help. Or perhaps they helped us?

Their domestication – because of their yummy hearts, kinda like artichokes once cooked down to a more digestible carbohydrate – goes back thousands of years in the Americas, probably pre-dating corn/maize. Some genetic variants seem to clump around the sites of settlements, suggesting people not only cultivated them but took them with them as they moved across the landscape. They’re extremely drought tolerant, which makes them a good food stuff in this arid climate. They famously (Agave tequilana) serve as a beverage base, and the fibers of their leaves can be woven into fabrics.

Fun agave fact: back a few million years, agaves share a common ancestor with asparagus.

We don’t eat or drink or wear them in my suburban Albuquerque neighborhood, at least that I know of, but maybe we could?

Parry’s is only one of the agaves found in the city’s suburban gardens. We’ve got a a couple variants of what I think are Agave americana in our yard. I’m a little confused about the native range of americana, but the book Agaves of Continental North America has them native mostly to Mexico with a few bits and bobs in south Texas and Arizona. One of our americanas, which we bought at a Tucson nursery, seems to struggle with the cold extremes of our winters, but it’s hanging on. The other is a monster of a “century plant” version we got from a friend, massive with frightening pokey bits at the end of its leaves, which when curled just so can catch the rain or the water when I give it the occasional shot from the hose.

There’s a sadness to the dramatic show the Parryis are putting on right now. They plants live 20-ish years plus or minus, and then go out in this blaze of glory, one dramatic push toward reproduction to spread seeds before they die.

But they often will send out “pups,” which with a bit of nurturing will carry on the lineage once the parent plant is gone.

 

Quoting Simon Willison

I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started.

The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years ago, but the second best time to start a blog is today.

Simon Willison, on the 23rd anniversary of his blog

Inkstain turned 22 in March, Simon’s blog is nine months older than mine. I’ve been blogging here continuously the whole time, and I very much agree with Simon on this point.

Brad Udall on climate change and the Colorado River

Via Allen Best, Brad Udall’s critically important comments at last week’s Getches-Wilkinson Colorado River conference:

Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.

The whole thing is worth your time.

The Colorado River Conclave

Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.

From the perspective of the panel’s charge – what have we learned since the 2007 agreements – the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: “intense negotiation among the seven basin states.

According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the ’07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the ’07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states weren’t the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.

This is not going well. At least I think it’s not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. “The current process seems to me to be like the conclave.”

In my gossip network, I’ve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administration’s point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.

Other stuff from the morning sessions

Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom – a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when I’m moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.

Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, that’s not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is “beyond awful.”

Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado River’s problems will require federal financial help.

A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. They’ve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just haven’t had the time to write about it yet, it’s super interesting.

Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say they’re interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochhead’s point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.

Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the state’s negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their state’s water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.

That’s on all of us.

Raton, New Mexico: notes on western railroad towns and urban form

Old US Western downtown with decorative streetlights, banners, and old brick buildings.

Raton, New Mexico

RATON, NEW MEXICO

The decorative streetlights, the hanging planters, the Chamber of Commercial-style tourist banners, the antique stores, the nascent brew pub scene. The old motels, with their seen-better-days charm. The newer motels (but still old), out by the interstate, with U-Hauls in the parking lot and their seen-better-days lack of charm.

The abandoned buildings, always.

The KOA campground looked nice.

There is a pattern to these old western towns, emerging as a railroad stop, evolving into a highway stop, abandoned, saved the interchanges, when the interstate highways rendered them irrelevant, but still totally relevant to their people. We can see the traces still visible of each successive layer of transportation infrastructure’s shaping and reshaping the town. What interests me is the way people continue to improvise, trying to build something new atop the old.

The practice, or praxis

I ride my bike through Raton, slowly, looking. I take pictures. I start with a plan based on looking at the map (“Oh look, there’s the train station!”) which I abandon. From the start I anticipate that I will abandon it, after seeing and thinking something I didn’t expect. This is, in fact, the plan. Part of the “praxis“, the mindful practice of inquiry, is looking for the point of abandonment of the plan, the place where immediate curiosity takes over. This, mindfully following curiosity, is key to the praxis.

I avoid the bike lane the kind people of Raton built for me in favor of the neighborhood behind the main corridor. This is where the people live.

The T-Town: Rail Era, 1879-1945

Black and white maps of three urban railroad town forms - towns symmetrically arranged around the tracks in two forms and one in a T-shape, with a Main Street branch off vertically from the tracks.

From Towns of the Western Railroads, John C. Hudson, 1982

Raton, New Mexico, is an example of a western urban design form historian John C. Hudson calls the “T-town.”

Dependent in its current existence on transportation networks, Raton sits at the southern mouth of Raton Pass, a funnel for humanity from time immemorial. The wagons of the Santa Fe Trail passed here, and the railroad tore through in its landscape-changing frenzy in the late 1800s. The classic T-town (and most other railroad towns) bear early markings of what James Scott calls “high modernism” and Henri LeFebvre calls “conceived space” – a grid of streets lined out on paper and transferred onto the land, rather than the vernacular of ambling streets springing up on old twisting footpaths. It is an intention placed on the land, enabling or directing or constraining the stuff the people then do here.

Spanish-style railroad station, with Raton sign, tracks to the right and a parked bicycle.

Raton, June 2025

The station bears the Moorish arches of the Spanish-Revival style of architecture, which is a trip. I think it was originally built in 1903, I do not know if the building now on the site is that same building. (Further Research Needed – FRN.) The station “welcomes thousands of Boy Scouts each summer as they head for the Philmont Ranch” (quoting Amtrak) and has no wi-fi.

First street parallels the tracks. It is where freight once would have been loaded and uploaded. Marchiando’s Dry Goods is closed, though I am left with the uneasy uncertainty of whether it was really Marchiando’s Dry goods or was left that way by movie set painters. FRN. In the classic urban form of the T-Town, the main street parallels the tracks one block away. This is the classic urban western town downtown, with all the accoutrements I have come to expect in my 60-plus years of wandering through these towns – lovely old two-story buildings, often brick, often in disrepair, often with energetic signs of entrepreneurial effort as communities try to make the best of their inherited assets: decorative street lamps, boutique hotels (or not), craft beer (or not), recreational rentals suitable to the surrounding countryside, home cooking-style diners.

In an hour of wandering, I see no trains other than empty rail cars, parked. I see no obvious tourists other than myself.

The Motels: Highway Era, 1920s to 1960s

A row of old motels and other highway artifacts, including one sign reading “motel/car wash”

Motel Row, Raton, New Mexico, June 2025

One layer out, the motels begin. US-85/87 followed the rail lines over Raton Pass (which had followed the wagon trail), and brought with it the other distinctive characteristic of these western towns: motel row. One can find places where old motel rows dazzle (Boulder City, Nevada, is my favorite – not a railroad town but full of pep and modern energy, catering to the Las Vegas visitor who wants to escape the smoke and the noise, which sometimes includes me). Such dazzle, though, is rare.

This was where I abandoned the plan, drawn by an establishment whose sign suggested it was a combination motel and car wash. As an old journalist colleague once observed, you can’t make up shit that good.

The richness of the observations trails off here. Part of the praxis is being on the bike. The motel row’s urban infrastructure involved cracked sidewalks and ducking in and out of parking lots. This is a great deal of fun, but reflects a shift from deep observation to rascally kid on a bike.

The Freeway Era: 1960s-now

The Interstate found its way past Raton sometime around 1960s (confused on exact date, FRN). It did what the Interstates always did – diverted traffic from the old through town routes, beginning the decay. Long before Walmarts, we began hollowing out these little western islands of urbanity when Interstates removed our need to drive through them. The result are little clusters of motels around the major exit complexes. The Holiday Inn Express where I stayed is out at the south end of town, down the old highway from the old Robin Hood Motel.

Scott and LeFebvre

The point of the trip is a lingering drive to Boulder, Colorado, for this week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River conference. I left early to get a few days of R&R, with the Space Ghost (bike) in the car and some books to read that have nothing to do with water. (I’ll have time for the water thinking soon enough.)

I’m returning to James Scott’s Thinking Like a State. His insights about the high modernist desire for legibility, the imposition by the state and capitalism of simplifying frameworks necessary for modern state/capitalism function, the clean square grid of lines drawn by the AT&SF town planners in Raton, the streamlines of the Interstates, is super useful. I’ve also got a pdf of Henri LeFebvre’s The Production of Space. Scott is lucid and clear, LeFebvre is tough going, but together they provide a framework for the sort of thinking about the nature of cities that remains an ongoing (if less blogged about) project for me.

LeFebvre seems to be making a useful distinction between “conceived space,” what the planners and architects and builders inhabited by Scott’s “high modernist” ethos intend, and “lived space” – what you and I actually do with and in it.

Left to our own devices, without the grids of Scott’s high modernists, we’re more likely to build twisty streets where the old footpath once ran, its location defined by a simple logic of where we are, where we want to go, and what’s the best way to get there. The twisting paths of Albuquerque’s old but still-used irrigation ditches are my favorite lived example.

But then – and this is the part that interests me right now, the part I’m looking for LeFebvre’s help with – we actually use the things that are there, often in different ways than their builders intended. My path to the supermarket cuts through the parking lot because the high modernist planners’ simplification in service of legibility designated the market as a place people would drive to in cars. They didn’t consider people walking to the store from the adjacent neighborhood. I ride my bike down the ditchbanks because it is safer and more pleasant than the streets.

We repurpose to meet our needs.

 

Colorado River Basin Reservoir Storage: where do we stand?

Graph showing declining Colorado River Basin reservoir storage since 2000.

Colorado River Basin reservoir storage.

Jack Schmidt* and John Fleck**

*Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University
**Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico School of Law
1 June 2025

 

We now begin June, when the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, should be swelling with melting snow for use later this year and beyond, but that is not happening. Although Lake Powell is our reservoir and Lake Mead is theirs (or vice versa), the two reservoirs are effectively one very large facility located downstream from Upper Basin consumptive users and upstream from Lower Basin users. At least 60% of the total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation is in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The total contents of the two reservoirs have been steadily declining since early July 2024 and continued to decline through at least 31 May 2025. Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring. Current reservoir storage data are showing us, in real time, an ominous pattern familiar from past dry years: upstream use of water before it has a chance to get to Lake Powell combined with releases from Lake Mead to users further downstream is outpacing the melting snowpack’s ability to replenish the two reservoirs.

While the normal tools we use for measuring and managing use of Colorado River water – the Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports and the Lower Basin decree accounting reports – lag by weeks or even years, reservoir storage, which is the net difference between stream flow into reservoirs and what is released downstream or is lost to evaporation, provides the closest thing we have to an accurate, real-time measure of the Colorado River basin’s water budget. Right now, we are not doing well.

  • The duration of time this year during which total storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has declined is unprecedented in the past 15 years. In a typical year, the steady decrease in the combined contents of Powell and Mead that begins the preceding summer ends in early May when Rocky Mountain snowmelt becomes significant. However, inflows to Lake Powell this year have yet to exceed releases from Lake Mead , and the total contents continue to decline, suggesting that this year’s recovery in storage will be minimal.
  • Data from other years also suggests that reservoir recovery this year will be relatively small. This year, total unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is predicted to be 55% of normal. Based on past trends, net increase in total reservoir storage of the 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation will be ~1.2 million acre feet (af). By July, we are likely to resume draw down the basin’s reservoirs until the 2026 snowmelt season begins.
  • Presently, storage in the watershed’s reservoirs is comparable to conditions in late summer and fall 2021 when water managers expressed significant concern. The very wet conditions of 2023 averted a major crisis, but the system remains depleted. In 2024, total basin reservoir storage climbed by 2.5 million af, but subsequent drawdown of those reservoirs was 3.6 million af during the following 10 months. Although the net difference between reservoir gain and subsequent drawdown of 1.1 million af might be considered “balanced” in the context of the last 15 years, there is no question that we have begun to mine the bounty of 2023, and we are likely to continue to do so until at least spring 2026 unless we greatly reduce consumptive uses.

For too long, we have hoped that big wet years will occur with sufficient frequency to avert true crisis, but there have been too few of those wet years during the 21st century. Only three of the last 15 years have been sufficiently wet to result in a significant increase in reservoir storage given the magnitude of the basin’s consumptive uses. We can’t continue with a water management policy that hopes for another wet year. The basin’s water managers have no choice but to further reduce consumptive uses to sustainably manage the dwindling water supply.

In response to a previously posted mini-white paper on reservoir storage, a supportive friend commented, “Nobody cares.” Another friend said, “I don’t see how we can get agreement about recovering storage. Let’s hope for more wet years.” We should care, and we need to try harder.

These mini-white papers seek to demonstrate that reservoir storage data, analyzed in aggregate, provide timely and accurate data relevant to understanding the reliability and security of the Colorado River’s water supply. These data are more precise, accurate, and timely than estimates of natural runoff, reservoir inflow, consumptive uses, or evaporation. Reservoir storage data provided by Reclamation are a significant contribution to transparency in water management. However, these data are under-utilized and under-analyzed and are typically reported without long-term context. We can do better.

These data can be used to develop an excellent correlation between April-July unregulated inflow to Lake Powell, forecast by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, and anticipated increase in basin-wide storage. Such an analysis strongly indicates that the 2025 snowmelt runoff will yield only a small increase in basin storage and necessitate greater reductions in consumptive use so as to better position the basin’s water users should next year also be dry.

Click here for our full report.

What the Mexican Treaty negotiations of the 1940s can tell us about 21st century Colorado River governance

Eric Kuhn, with some help from Anne Castle and myself, has taken a useful dive into what was known in the 1940s as Congress was considering the treaty between the United States and Mexico regarding how to share the waters of the Colorado River.

Drawing on the analysis of Colorado’s Royce Tipton, Eric draws out a theme we explored in our book Science Be Dammed – the gap between the scientific understanding of the day and the hydrologic reality we must now face as we try to manage a shrinking river.

Tipton, representing the state of Colorado, made a compelling case that there was enough water, including return flows from Lower Colorado River water use, to meet a 1.5 million acre foot allocation to Mexico without impairing US users.

California, already growing accustomed to living off the surplus of other water users’ unused apportionments, opposed the deal. Any water allocated to Mexico would cut into that surplus.

(California’s) major Colorado River projects were either complete, like the All-American Canal, or nearing completion, such as Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River Aqueduct. In the 1930s, California agencies had signed contracts with the United States for 5.36 maf of Hoover Dam water, but under the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act, they only had a “senior” right to 4.4 maf. Thus, over 900,000 af of its water supply was reliant upon surplus water being available. California’s primary concern was that, together with further development by the other basin states, the treaty would significantly reduce or eliminate the surplus water available for use within the United States. California did not want to be limited to 4.4 maf per year.

Tipton’s hydrology was based on a wetter climate than we have today. It also was based on the idea of “salvage by use” – that water use in, for example, Arizona, should be apportioned based on the impact of that use on the main stem of the river, not on how much was being consumed at the point of use. This would be then, and remains today, a critical point of unresolved water law.

Tipton’s hydrology was based on studies completed by the Bureau of Reclamation as a part of its comprehensive development study of the basin. The period of record was 1897-1943, with a reconstructed natural flow (the flow that would have been in the stream absent human modifications) at the international boundary with Mexico of 17.75 maf per year (16.3 maf per year at Lee Ferry). Additionally, Tipton told the Committee that because of salvage by use (the reduction of natural losses as the flow of the river is reduced through consumption) a minimum of another 1.25 maf/year would be available for use in the United States. The major portion of his estimated salvage by use water would be generated on Arizona’s Gila River. Tipton believed that Mexico’s consumptive use in 1943 was approximately 1.8 maf/year, more than what the treaty would guarantee. He emphasized that an estimated 8 to 10 maf/year was then currently flowing into Mexico and because the Hoover Dam power operation stabilized the river, Mexico could substantially increase its irrigation use. He was reinforcing the core argument by the supporting states: the treaty would limit Mexico to less water than it was currently using by about 300,000 af per year, and without a treaty, in the future Mexico might acquire more water through international arbitration.

Key to Tipton’s winning argument in support of the treaty was the belief that the agreement would constrain what might otherwise be increasing Mexican demands on the river.

Eric also found a wonderful bit of business from Tipton that echoes in today’s Colorado River Basin arguments over what constitutes “hydrologic shortage”:

[A]s a member of the engineering profession I will admit that engineers have made mistakes many times. One type of mistake that has been made in the West has been recommendations to irrigate areas larger than available water supplies would permit. Some of these errors were made on account of lack of stream flow records. Most overexpansion, however, has resulted from the lack of control of development under our western water laws. In most states no one can be denied the right to appropriate the waters of a stream; and the only control is the administration of the use of the water so appropriated by the system of priorities. So that we have many, many systems that have only flood rights on our streams, which is due to no one’s fault.

We conclude with some advice about what might be done next:

While the Colorado River Basin is currently focused on the negotiations between the Upper and Lower Division States over the future management of the river, the post-2026 operating rules, sooner than later the United States and Mexico will have to negotiate the successor to Minute 323. Both Minute 323 and the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire at the end of 2026. Given the current stalemate between the divisions over the future operations of the river, both hydrologic and political uncertainties loom large.

Rather than waiting for the Basin States to resolve their differences, which may ultimately require lengthy interstate litigation, Mexico and the United States may want to consider a parallel and alternative approach. They should consider abandoning complicated approaches that set annual deliveries based on how much water is being used by the Lower Division States or Lake Mead storage levels and instead negotiate an agreement based on giving Mexico a fixed percentage of the river’s natural flow (probably at Lee Ferry). By doing so, they could set an example for a long-term solution that works for the entire basin.

Royce Tipton and the Hydrology of the 1944 Treaty with Mexico.