TDR report authors answer questions

By WALT WILLIAMS Chronicle Staff Writer

Gallatin County officials got the chance Tuesday to question the authors of a report that says a development rights transfer program could work in the county, with some changes.

Such programs, known as transferable development rights or TDRs, are designed to concentrate growth toward urban areas while preserving rural open space.

The report, by Solimar Research Group of Ventura, Calif., concluded that there is sufficient supply and demand for land in Gallatin County for the program to work, although the authors advised against tying the program to permanent deed restriction, believing that could scare away rural landowners.

Gallatin County would not be the first place in the nation to adopt such a program, and the Solimar group said that successful programs are designed well from the start.

County Commission Chairman Joe Skinner said he doubted the county would get the program 100 percent correct the first time around.

“If we do this, I think we would need the ability to tweak it,” he said.

TDRs work by allowing rural property owners to sell their rights to development their land to owners of land near urban areas who might want to build with greater density.

In Gallatin County, if the TDR works as proposed, it would be a policy tool to direct future development away from rural areas and toward Bozeman, Belgrade and Manhattan.

Solimar president William Fulton said there is no question that Gallatin County is going to continue to grow.

“The question is: ‘Where is it going to go and what configuration is it going to take?'” Fulton said.

Fulton and Solimar research associate Darren Greve went over the report Tuesday during a joint meeting of the Gallatin County Commission and Planning Board. Twenty-one other people also attended, a mix of planning staff and local building industry representatives.

The idea behind TDRs is to give landowners more incentive to preserve their land as open space by allowing them to profit off their properties by selling their right to build.

The Solimar authors were divided on how much the county could tweak a TDR program once it's in place, with Greve not seeing much room.

Fulton was more optimistic, saying the county could make changes, keeping in mind those changes might add or take away property values. Still, he said, that's a risk common to most land-use policy decisions.

Gallatin County officials are looking at restricting development in the county's unzoned rural areas to as low as one home per 160 acres. Landowners in those areas could then sell their TDRs to developers with projects around the county's cities, allowing those projects to build more homes than what zoning otherwise allows.

When asked by county officials whether zoning was necessary to make a TDR program work, the authors said all of the programs they knew about required some type of density regulation to be successful.

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