ELLENSBURG, Wash. -- Kittitas County, which has become one of the state's major battlegrounds between the forces of growth and conservation, has a new program to try to bring those competing interests into balance.

County commissioners recently approved a Transfer of Development Rights program, known as a TDR, that makes Kittitas the first county in Eastern Washington to adopt the unusual land-use tool to conserve farm and forest lands.

"This is a way to bring some of the value back to rural areas while keeping them rural," said Skip Swenson of the Cascade Land Conservancy, a Seattle-based nonprofit hired by Kittitas County to create the program..

While many of the details have yet to be worked out, the program is welcomed by some and regarded with skepticism by others.

County Commissioner Paul Jewell, who has made the program one of his priorities in recent years, said few would argue with its goal.

"We want to preserve our rural character for our children without stomping on people's property rights," Jewell said. "This is an innovative option that will have a positive and lasting impact in all of Kittitas County."

In its simplest form, transferring development rights is a way to compensate owners of farms and forests for not taking advantage of the development potential of their land.

Through individual, market-based transactions, development rights are sold by farmers and forest landowners to developers in higher-density areas that want additional growth. The county will identify which areas will be permitted to sell development rights and which areas can buy them to use to increase the density of a residential, commercial or retail development.

While the program won't supplant existing land-use ordinances and zoning, the expectation is that urban areas will grow more dense while rural areas will retain their open spaces. Development rights are intended to help developers and local communities accommodate growth without spoiling the rural landscape that draws homeowners and businesses to places like Kittitas County in the first place.

To orchardist Fritz Glover, the TDR program is a tool to allow people like him to continue doing what they love on their land without succumbing to the economic pressure to sell out to developers.

"This program is going to demand some imagination and cooperation, but it shows we as a community are looking at ways to keep our quality of life," Glover said.

Others say the program can't change what they consider to be weak zoning ordinances, and they criticize an "anything goes" mentality on the part of commissioners and county land-use officials.

"People can basically do anything they want now, so why bother?" said Paula Thompson, a member of the Kittitas County Conservation Coalition, which is challenging one of the county's land-use regulations in state court as being in violation of the Growth Management Act.

The concept of selling development rights in order to preserve open space has been around at least 40 years.

Some 181 TDR programs are in place across the country, including one in King County that began in 1993 and has conserved 136,969 acres, according to the Cascade Land Conservancy.

Despite the state Growth Management Act, which is supposed to control costly sprawl, Kittitas County has been losing working farm and ranch land for years.

There were roughly 7,500 fewer acres of such land in 2007 compared with 2004, according to the conservancy, which analyzed data from the county.

The data also shows the county lost 1,900 acres of upland private forests in those three years.

Meanwhile, the county had the third-highest growth rate in the state at nearly 15 percent from 2000 to 2007, mostly due to a high net migration of new residents into the county's rural areas, according to the state Office of Financial Management.

The idea of buying and selling development rights to conserve land got a jumpstart in the county earlier this year at the historic Parker Ranch in the Manastash hills near Ellensburg.

The Parker sisters inherited the property after their father, rancher Jack Parker, died. But as is often the case with old ranch land, Parker never owned the timber rights. Those belonged to Boise Cascade and later to Western Pacific Timber Co.

Worried that the company was prepared to clear the timber, one of the sisters, Franki Storlie, asked for help from Jill Arango, head of the Cascade Land Conservancy's Kittitas County office in Ellensburg.

After more than a year of work, the state provided funds to the sisters to buy the rights to 480 acres of timber on the ranch. The transaction was completed in May of last year and a conservation easement was placed on the land, prohibiting development.

"We saved the trees from major logging that I felt sure was going to happen," Franki Storlie said in a telephone interview.

"My feeling about TDRs is that they give people a way to preserve their land but still give them some funds. It's a way to promote this preservation of earth," she said.

TDR programs can be used by developers in a variety of ways. For example, in Redmond, a suburban community east of Seattle, the rights can be used by developers to add height to a project, increase parking or substitute for requirements to add park land.

Senior planner Jeff Churchill wrote in a recently published article that the program, even after 12 years in place, continues to face big challenges. One is finding property owners who are eligible to sell their rights and then explaining the process. Churchill said many property owners have a tenuous understanding of the program.

The second problem has been creating an active marketplace.

"Redmond has not found a way to provide TDR sellers with a list of buyers," Churchill said.

Glover, the orchardist, said he is eager to see how buyers and sellers will come together in Kittitas County. He favors expanding the market beyond county lines so that a developer in King County could buy development rights from a farmer in Kittitas County.

Swenson of the Cascade Land Conservancy said development rights programs evolve as communities define their common goals. Growth and conservation, he said, are not mutually exclusive.

"There are common threads where our values cross," Swenson said. "It's just a matter of finding them."

* Leah Beth Ward can be reached at 509-577-7626 or lward@yakimaherald.com.