05:58 PM PST on Wednesday, January 18, 2006

By GARY CHITTIM / KING 5 News

An unusual deal allows a downtown Seattle building project to get taller, the Girl Scouts to get richer and King County rural lands to stay rural.

Camp River Ranch is a quietly operated Girl Scouts Camp tucked away in a corner of the Snoqualmie Valley. The 438-acre camp not only provides a valuable home for fish, birds and wildlife, it also provides billionaire Paul Allen’s Vulcan Development Corporation to raise the roof on a downtown building project.

"I just don't see a downside to this program and there was a vision that was tied to it,” said Peter Steinbrueck of the Seattle City Council.

There were actually several visions: Seattle City leaders envisioned a greener denser city, Paul Allen’s Vulcan Development Corporation envisions a model of South Lake Union becoming reality and King County envisioned preserving the camp.

“They had a lot of acres and they had development rights on acreage and the key was, we wanted that camp to remain a camp,” said King County Executive Ron Sims.

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Seattle will raise the current height restrictions on Vulcan's downtown buildings.

So they brokered a blockbuster deal. Vulcan paid the Girl Scouts camp $210,000 for those development rights and transferred the rights to King County which convinced the city to raise the current height restrictions on Vulcan’s downtown buildings.

It’s similar to a transfer of development rights of the Snoqualmie tree farm in 2004 and is rapidly becoming the way of doing business in King County,.

For the key players it’s purely business but this is a transaction. For some other groups, that has some very welcome side affects. Protecting forest lands from development helps protect the protected fish and birds that live there Environmental groups love the program and hope it may the last chance to keep King County’s wild side from being lost forever.

So far, the Transfer of Development Rights program, or TDR, has helped preserve nearly 100,000 acres in and around King County.