ELLENSBURG — 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.

The idea of buying and selling development rights to conserve land got a jump-start 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 last May 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.

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.”