King County, population 1,737,034 (2000), includes the Seattle metropolitan area on the west and the Cascade Mountains and Wenatchee National Forest on the east. As detailed in Beyond Takings and Givings, the County’s original TDR program, adopted in 1993, allowed receiving sites exclusively on land under County jurisdiction. In 1998, King County adopted a second TDC ordinance referred to as the “TDC Pilot Project Program”. For a three-year trial period, this new ordinance allowed transfers from rural portions of King County to incorporated cities within the County. This program offered cities incentives to participate in the form of amenities for receiving area neighborhoods funded by the County. In 1999, the County budget included $1.5 million for the purchase of TDCs and another $500,000 for receiving area amenities to offset the impacts of increased densities in receiving areas within incorporated cities that enter into interlocal agreements with the County to accept development credits from unincorporated County land. In March of 2000, King County adopted an ordinance that created a TDC bank and established transaction procedures. In 2000, the City of Seattle and King County entered into an interlocal agreement that put the County’s TDC Pilot Program into effect. Based on progress with the City of Seattle and a significant transfer to another incorporated city, King County made the provisions of the TDC Pilot Program a permanent fixture of the County Code in 2001.
King County used TDR to preserve the 90,000-acre Snoqualmie Forest, the largest preserved sending area in the nation.
The King County TDC Code Section, as of 2001, states that the County’s program is designed to permanently preserve rural resources and urban separators while encouraging increased density within cities, where it can best be accommodated by urban services.
Sending sites must meet one of the following site criteria.
- Land planned or zoned for agriculture.
- Land planned or zoned for forest.
- Forested parcels at least 15 acres in size planned for rural forest and zoned RA.
- Land designated or meeting standards for proposed rural or resource area regional trails or rural or resource area open space site.
- Habitat of any federally listed endangered or threatened species.
- Land planned as Urban Separator and zoned R-1.
To calculate the number of TDRs that can be transferred, the gross area of the sending site is reduced by the land area of any existing easements, the minimum lot size requirement for any existing or planned residences, code required setbacks and all submerged land. Please refer to Beyond Takings and Givings for details about the process of the King County TDC program.
As reported in Beyond Takings and Givings, when the County funded its TDR Bank in 1999, it used almost the entire $1.5 million to preserve 285 acres on Sugarloaf Mountain. This put 56 TDCs in the King County bank valued at approximately $26,000 each. Sugarloaf Mountain is located in rural King County and provides views of Mount Rainier, Tacoma and downtown Seattle.
According to Mark Sollitto, King County TDR Program Manager, the first transfer under King County’s 1998 TDC Pilot Program also occurred in 1999. The sending site is 313 acres of forested land. This area is referred to as the McCormack Forest or the Mitchell Hill Connector. A developer paid the owner of this 313-acre property $3.75 million for the development rights allowing the transfer of 62 rural residential credits. The credits were converted at the rate of 8,065 square feet of commercial floor area per rural residential credit. These credits were used to allow 500,000 square feet of additional floor area in an office complex to be occupied by Microsoft. The office developer was motivated to buy credits because the TDC option was estimated to cost 20 percent less than the market rate cost of providing office space at that time. The receiving site is located in the incorporated City of Issaquah, making this the first inter jurisdictional transfer in the Pacific Northwest. As part of this transfer, the developers also contributed an additional $1 million toward transportation improvements in Issaquah. The County used $250,000 of public funds to acquire title and timber rights from the sending site. This sending area is important because it links 1,700 acres of open space to the west with 1,000 acres of state land, providing a regional corridor for both wildlife and hikers. In additional, this area includes several key salmon spawning streams.
In July 2002, Mr. Sollitto announced that the County had used $2.8 million to buy 88 TDRs from Ames Lake Forest, a private, 443-acre working forest. In addition to woodland preservation, this transaction protects Patterson Creek, a Coho salmon spawning stream. The preserved property links with adjacent Tolt MacDonald Park to create a 1000-acre “green wall”.
In September 2005, King County used $22 million of Conservation Futures Tax revenues to buy TDRs that secure the protection of more than 90,000 acres east of Seattle known as the Snoqualmie Forest. To put this in perspective, the amount of land protected in this single transaction is twice the size of the City of Seattle. This action secures an urban limit line, ensures that the land will forever be used as a working forest, protects timber industry jobs and creates a buffer for the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. Hancock Timber, which has conservation ownership arrangements on other forest land, will continue to own the land and use it for timber management. The 990 TDRs severed from the 90,000-acre forest were placed in the County’s TDR Bank for resale. The Conservation Futures Fund is a tax on all real property in the County earmarked exclusively for open space acquisition and resource protection.
With preservation of the Snoqualmie Forest, King County leapt ahead of all other TDR programs in the nation for the amount of land protected. (Previously programs in Montgomery County, Maryland, the New Jersey Pinelands and Palm Beach County, Florida tied for first place with roughly 43,000 acres preserved by TDR each.)
In January, King County received an easement from the Girl Scouts for its 438-acre Camp River Ranch, including a half-mile stretch of the Tolt River near the town of Carnation in the Snoqualmie Valley. Paul Allen’s Vulcan Development Corporation bought 14 development rights from the Girls Scouts for $210,000 and proposes to use those TDRs to build 28,000 square feet of additional residential space in a project in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood at the southwest corner of Westlake Avenue North and Denny Way. The receiving area project, expected to break ground in 2006, is a 450,000-square foot mixed-use development incorporating 300,000 square feet of office space, 19,000 square feet of retail and 121 condominiums. In addition to the 14 TDRs sold to Vulcan, the County facilitated the purchase of another 53 TDRs, resulting in a total payment of roughly $1 million for the Girl Scouts. The easement assures outdoor recreational opportunities for future generations and also safeguards one of the most productive spawning habitats of the protected chinook salmon.
