Buying Land in Franklin County, Washington

A voluntary GMA planner built around a fast-growing city

Franklin County is one of the smaller number of Washington counties that chose to fully plan under the 1990 Growth Management Act rather than being required to by the statute's population or growth-rate thresholds -- the county opted in back in 1991. That choice means Franklin runs the same basic GMA machinery as a mandatory-planning county like King or Pierce: a Comprehensive Plan (the current version covers 2018-2038), Countywide Planning Policies (adopted 2019), and a Title 17 zoning code meant to implement the plan's land-use designations. The Planning and Economic Development Department, based in Pasco, administers all of it for unincorporated Franklin County.

Because the county's GMA participation was voluntary rather than mandated, it's worth confirming directly with the county how rigorously specific Comprehensive Plan provisions have been implemented into current zoning-code language, rather than assuming a King County-style level of GMA compliance detail. The zoning designation on a specific parcel -- not the general fact that the county 'plans under the GMA' -- is what actually controls use and density.

Pasco's growth keeps redrawing the county's Urban Growth Area

Pasco, the county seat and Franklin's dominant city, has spent roughly two decades as one of the fastest-growing mid-size cities in the state, driven by Tri-Cities-area job growth (agriculture processing, Hanford-adjacent employment across the river in Benton County, and general Columbia Basin economic expansion). The city adopted its current Comprehensive Plan in 2008, updated it in 2018, and began a major new update in 2025 that's expected to conclude by the end of 2026.

For a land buyer, the practical consequence is that Franklin County's Urban Growth Area boundary around Pasco is not a fixed, decades-stable line the way it might be around a slower-growing city. A parcel just outside the current UGA edge is a realistic candidate to be pulled inside it at the next periodic update, which changes the applicable zoning, density, and utility-extension expectations. Confirm a parcel's current UGA status with the county planning department, and ask specifically whether it falls within an area under active UGA-expansion discussion, before assuming its rural zoning is stable long-term.

Columbia Basin Project irrigation, not private wells, dominates rural land here

Much of Franklin County's rural land value is tied directly to Columbia Basin Project irrigation water, delivered via a system that traces back to the first water reaching fields near Pasco in 1948 and expanding through the 1950s as canals carried Grand Coulee Dam releases across the basin. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 751 farms across 586,594 acres in the county, and Columbia Basin agriculture across Franklin, Adams, Grant, and Lincoln counties together represents roughly a third of the total value of Washington's agricultural production -- with irrigated Columbia Basin potato yields among the highest in the world.

This matters for how a buyer should evaluate water on a Franklin County agricultural parcel: the state hub's general discussion of Ecology permit-exempt wells and the Hirst/streamflow-restoration framework mostly describes the rules for new domestic wells, not the water supply that makes most of this county's farmland productive. For irrigated land, confirm which irrigation district (if any) serves the parcel, whether its water-right entitlement transfers with the land, and the district's current delivery contract terms -- that's the water question that actually determines a Franklin County farm parcel's productive value.

Septic permitting runs through a two-county health district

If a parcel isn't served by a public sewer system, on-site sewage disposal is permitted by the Benton-Franklin Health District (BFHD) rather than by Franklin County government directly -- BFHD serves both Franklin and Benton counties out of a shared environmental health program. BFHD sets minimum design standards (for example, a 1,000-gallon minimum tank for a one-to-four-bedroom single-family residence, with an additional 250 gallons required per additional bedroom) and handles site evaluations, design review, and inspections. Confirm current application procedures and any site-specific soil or setback constraints directly with BFHD before assuming a straightforward septic approval.