Inside the ‘Revolutionary’ New Colorado River Proposal

In the contentious talks over how states will split the shrinking Colorado River, negotiators are reaching consensus on one point: Just go with the “natural flow.”

The concept is a somewhat simple one. Instead of negotiating future cuts across the entire seven-state region, the process would rely on recent water records — the amount of water flowing from the Colorado River headwaters in the Upper Basin to a point in Arizona marking the boundary of the Lower Basin states.