Cattle were still grazing the field off Gannett Road when the Blaine County Board of Commissioners voted, 2 to 1, to approve Cove Springs North: a 50-lot subdivision carved out of 191 acres about three and a half miles south of Bellevue. The estimated sale price per lot was $238,820. On paper, that looks like a straightforward math problem. Acreage in, lots out, price per lot. In practice, getting from 191 acres to 50 approved lots took the applicant, Bellevue-based Blackburn Farming, roughly a year and a half of hearings, a renegotiated water covenant, a shift of development rights between two parcels of the same property, and a workforce housing contribution that got talked down from nearly half a million dollars to just under $180,000.
None of that shows up in a price-per-acre listing. That's the point.
If you're pricing raw land in Blaine County by dividing the ask by the acreage, you're comparing the wrong number. The figure that actually determines what a parcel is worth is a zoning designation most buyers never think to look up: whether the land sits in the county's Transfer of Development Rights sending area or its receiving area. Two parcels of identical size, a mile apart, can carry radically different buildable value depending on which side of that line they fall on. Cove Springs North is a useful case study precisely because it shows the mechanism working in real time, on a real property, with real dollar figures attached.
The Line the County Drew in 2006
Blaine County adopted its TDR program in 2006 as part of a broader downzone. Land below Baseline Road, in the agricultural corridor south of Bellevue, was cut from one buildable unit per 20 acres to one unit per 40 acres. In exchange, owners in that "sending" area got something new: the right to sell the development potential they'd just lost to someone else, in a designated "receiving" area north of Pero Road, where density could climb as high as one unit per 2.5 acres.
The idea was simple. Keep open space and agricultural land intact where it already existed, and let new building concentrate closer to roads, water, and existing infrastructure. The market for actually buying and selling those rights took over a decade to prove itself.
The One Time the County Tested the Price
For years, nobody knew what a Blaine County TDR was actually worth. The county held three of them after an easement deal with the Wood River Land Trust and tried to auction them off in August 2018. The auction failed. Four months later, on a second attempt, all three sold: two for $23,000 each, one for $32,000. As one county official put it at the time, that sale meant a buyer could effectively create a new buildable lot for $32,000, a number the program's architects had guessed at for twelve years but never seen tested until then.
That 2018 sale remains the clearest public benchmark for what a Blaine County development right costs on the open market. It's a small number next to what raw acreage sells for elsewhere in the county, and that gap is exactly why the designation matters more than the dirt.
What Sending and Receiving Actually Allow
| Sending area | Receiving area | |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline density | 1 unit per 40 acres | 1 unit per 20 acres, before TDR purchase |
| Density with TDRs | Not applicable, rights are sold away | Up to 1 unit per 2.5 acres |
| Minimum lot size | 40 acres (original lot of record) | 1 acre |
| Open space requirement | Land stays in agriculture or open space | At least 50% of the receiving parcel |
| Minimum parcel to participate | 40 acres | 10 contiguous acres |
National land aggregators tracking Blaine County listings have recently priced raw acreage anywhere from roughly $40,000 to $80,000 an acre, a spread wide enough that an average tells a buyer almost nothing. Some of that variation is location and views. A meaningful share of it is this designation, which most listings don't mention and most out-of-area buyers don't ask about.
Cove Springs Shows the Mechanism Without a Sale
Cove Springs North isn't technically a TDR transaction. No development rights changed hands between a sending-area seller and a receiving-area buyer. But the property sits inside a designated TDR Receiving Area near Bellevue, and the application that went before commissioners this year did exactly what the 2006 ordinance was built to encourage: it moved density toward the road and away from farmland.
Under a 2009 development agreement, the northern piece of the property, Parcel B, was entitled to 37 lots. The request that came before the Planning and Zoning Commission in May 2025 asked to shift 17 more developable units south to north, from Parcel F up to Parcel B, concentrating homes closer to Gannett Road and leaving more of the southern acreage in pasture. Opal Engineering's Samantha Stahlnecker, representing the applicant, described the goal as preserving as much of the active agricultural land as possible while still hitting a lot count she called "a nice round number": 50.
The commission didn't approve that shift quickly. Planning and Zoning Chair Susan Giannettino flagged that the underlying development agreement was 15 years old, and noted that
"the reality of the valley today is not what it was in 2009."
Water was the sharper problem. The Big Wood Aquifer is under an Idaho Department of Water Resources moratorium on new consumptive use, which meant the developer had to build a community water system limited to domestic use only, put a septic system on every lot, and prove the subdivision's net water draw wouldn't exceed what the property already used. That single constraint, not the zoning math, is what actually slowed the project down.
By the time the Board of County Commissioners voted this January, the deal had also picked up a public benefit package: a covenant tying water rights to the subdivision, annual nitrate testing, four new public parking spaces preserving an existing access easement to BLM land, and a $179,150 contribution to the Blaine County Housing Authority, paid out at $3,583 per lot as they sell. The Housing Authority had asked for closer to $498,000. Public comment at the hearing included a 26-year-old resident, Eli Conrad, describing how difficult it had become to find an attainable lot in the valley at all. Property records list Blackburn Farming's co-owner on Parcel B as an entity called Ziggy's Piggies, a detail that says less about zoning than about how many working agricultural operations still sit underneath these subdivision applications.
What This Means If You're Pricing Raw Acreage
Before comparing two parcels on price per acre alone, it's worth checking a short list of things the listing itself won't tell you:
- Whether the parcel falls in a designated TDR sending area, receiving area, or neither. The county's TDR information page and GIS parcel viewer both show this.
- How old the underlying development agreement is, if one exists. Cove Springs North's 2009 agreement needed a public modification hearing before anything could move.
- Whether the parcel draws from the Big Wood Aquifer or another basin currently under a state consumptive-use moratorium, since that can force a community water system and septic design regardless of what the zoning allows.
- Whether any workforce housing contribution or density bonus applies, and what a realistic negotiated number looks like rather than the initial ask.
The Tool Isn't Standing Still
The Bellevue corridor isn't the only place this applies. A more recent designated sending area tied to the Silver Creek Preserve, protected in part through The Nature Conservancy's easements, covers roughly 19,290 acres and could theoretically generate as many as 964 development rights, though only 14 had been certified as of a 2019 county report. That gap between potential and certified rights is itself informative: landowners in these areas often don't realize what they're sitting on until someone asks.
For a buyer evaluating raw land, a developer scoping a subdivision, or a seller sitting on agricultural acreage they've held for decades, the acreage number is the least interesting thing about the parcel. What actually prices it is a designation on a map, a development agreement's age, and, increasingly, a water right.
FAQ
What is a TDR in Blaine County? A Transfer of Development Right lets a landowner in a designated "sending" area, where zoning has been reduced, sell the building right they lost to a landowner in a "receiving" area, who can then build at higher density than the base zoning would otherwise allow.
How do I find out if a specific parcel is in a sending or receiving area? Blaine County's Land Use Department maintains a TDR layer on its GIS parcel viewer, searchable by address or parcel ID, along with a public information page describing the program's mechanics.
Does owning a TDR guarantee I can subdivide? No. A certified TDR gives a receiving-area landowner the option to increase density, but any actual subdivision still goes through the county's standard planning and zoning review, including road, water, and open space requirements.
Is the 2018 auction price still a reliable benchmark? It's the clearest public sale on record, but TDR pricing is negotiated privately between buyer and seller. Treat it as a historical reference point, not a current quote.
Raw land math in Blaine County rarely resolves on the first read of a listing. If you're evaluating acreage, a development agreement, or a parcel's TDR status before making an offer, Jordan Jadallah can walk through the actual entitlement picture with you before you price anything off the acreage alone.
