Mason Reed, owner of Tim’s Tavern in White Center thought his troubles with King County Permitting officials were finally over. He’d moved the outdoor stage he’d operated indoors in February and which had provoked complaints at a cost of $100,000. But the future of his business—which had quickly become an icon in the Seattle musician community as a place new bands still have an opportunity to play live—now looked bleak again. The County told Reed he’d have to jump through even more hoops.
“I respect the law, but this is starting to feel unfair, selective, and targeted,” Reed said. Almost two years of noise complaints from a handful of neighbors about the outdoor shows at Tim’s Tavern had “opened up this can of worms.”
One of the options King County presented to Reed to comply with the North Highline Urban Design Standards (NHUDS), which went into effect last year, was returning the popular patio of his bar to its original use: a parking lot. According to Reed, the NHUDS had not come up before in meetings with the county.
As a “matter of survival,” he started a “Honeycomb” campaign, asking supporters to sign an open letter of support to King County, make donations to fund the remodel and navigate a complex permitting process, with potentially a return on their investment, and help change the zoning laws in White Center.
In the first 24 hours after the campaign went live, 1,500 Tim’s Tavern supporters signed the petition. Another 1,200 signed after that. King County has since “changed their tune,” Reed reports. He is working with officials on a plan to comply, which involves demolishing the outdoor stage, adding an emergency exit, moving the fence, planting native vegetation by a licensed arborist along the street, and probably removing the roof of the patio. The fate of the iconic Airstream trailer bar is still undecided.
“They’re offering me a path forward, albeit an expensive one,” Reed says. “If a licensed arborist is the hill they want to die on, I am more than happy to oblige. It beats turning the patio into a parking lot.”
That doesn’t mean his problems are gone. While the $82,000 the Honeycomb campaign raised is almost enough to offset the $100,000 for the construction of the indoor stage, the donations do not cover his new costs. And the ongoing uncertainty about Tim’s Tavern’s future has impacted his revenue. Customers are inquiring if the venue is still open; concert attendance is down, according to Reed.
But his ordeal is not about him or his business, he emphasizes. “It’s about our community, this city, this county. It’s about displacement.”
It’s a theme that resonates with many residents in greater Seattle and other cities. No wonder the Tim’s Tavern saga, which started in 2023, has grown into an all-out community effort to safeguard White Center’s future as a cultural and music hub. This was on full display at the NHUAC community meeting in June, which County Council member Teresa Mosqueda of District 8 attended to tout the investments in White Center she had fought for.
A month earlier, the NHUAC meeting ended in a shouting match between neighbors. Although the music venue wasn’t even on the agenda in June and one of the board members said that “it would be nice if there were other things we could talk about,” the embattled tavern’s fate quickly became the main topic again. At least half the room was filled with supporters and business owners who wanted clarity about the situation and strongly voiced their support for Tim’s Tavern.
“You make sure that those code folks know that you keep them accountable, that you’re looking at them, instead of them just blindly enforcing the code,” musician and Tim’s Tavern regular Skye Wait from White Center told Mosqueda. She was quick to emphasize she had received many calls and messages from Tim’s Tavern supporters: “We’re looking for a win-win situation with the departments. Social cohesion is critically important.”
There was also much criticism from attendants about the lack of transparency related to the structure of the unelected NHUAC board (which functions as a liaison with King County because White Center does not have a city government) and the influence it has with county officials. At least one member privately filed noise complaints against Tim’s.
“I totally guarantee that King County sees them as representative of the community. But they are not,” Wait says. NHUAC represents “old White Center, with the power structures of whiteness and a desire for the neighborhood to never change” in a highly diverse community.
Wait hopes other residents will get on the board in the future. “All parties have to stay involved and not fight each other,” he feels. “NHUAC has the voice and the members have to welcome us. If not, they shouldn’t be on the board.”
(NHUAC Vice President Barbara Dobkin didn’t want to talk to Post Alley for this story.)
The ongoing issues around Tim’s Tavern have also caused concern in the small business community in White Center, where King County’s opaque and confusing permitting process was already a source of frustration for some business owners—the refrain is that officials don’t provide a full overview of requirements right from the start but keep adding extra requirements, causing uncertainty for owners and the necessity of making large additional investments or just forgoing their earlier expenses.
And there is a deeper concern: that Tim’s is a test case for ushering in a new, sleeker White Center with a stronger tax base. “I’m concerned about some people’s vision for what the neighborhood should look like as opposed to what is functional for the people here,” Jorge Perez, co-owner of the Lariat Bar, says. “They have the power. We do the work, we live here. It takes away people’s equity. They are laying the foundation for other people to come in and decide what our neighborhood is going to be.”
The North Highline Urban Design Standards, which Tim’s Tavern owner Reed now has to comply with, place an undue burden on business owners and residents, Jose Ortuzar, Economic Organizer at the White Center Community Development Association, adds. “They need to be rethought. There are a lot of requirements for facades and landscaping, which is not realistic for what we have in White Center. People will be priced out.”
Although two King County officials gave elaborate interviews for a Post Alley story in March, this time county representatives only want to answer questions by email “because this is an active case.”
Communications Director Chrissy Russillo denies any additional requirements were placed on Tim’s and says the North Highline Urban Design Standards were mentioned last year in a meeting with Reed. However, asked how the county plans to make the permitting process more transparent and easier to navigate for small business owners who can’t rely on legal departments to guide them through it, the answer itself shows applicants can indeed find themselves lost in a regulatory maze:
“There are many ways to demonstrate compliance with codes,” Russillo writes, “and it is the responsibility of the applicant to pose something for Permitting’s consideration of code compliance.”
It doesn’t get any easier when it comes to the NHUDS: “The standards emphasize development that promotes pedestrian-oriented development along designated street frontages,” adds Russillo. “This could vary across different development proposal and does not have any one type of designated design form.”
In the case of Tim’s, Reed is facing even bigger obstacles because he seeks permits for unpermitted structures, which is a “very time-intensive and iterative process requiring corrections and rework.”
In the meantime, Tim’s owner Mason Reed Mason keeps plowing ahead. Once the new structure has been completed and approved, he will apply for a permit to have 60 outdoor shows a year, probably on a larger stage in the parking lot of his venue. Cost: another $9,000 on Reed’s ever-growing tab.
“A permit for live music is how this all started,” Reed says. “We took a little side quest. But we’re the little venue that could.”
It remains to be seen if Reed succeeds in obtaining the permit since it requires public hearings and some residents already expressed apprehension at the June NHUAC meeting about 60 outdoor concerts a year. Then again, the designation of White Center as a countywide urban center and high-capacity transit community, with 1420 new housing units and 1220 new jobs through 2034, might work in Reed’s favor and could help him get the zoning in downtown White Center updated.
The indomitable bar owner also has plans to create the White Center Cultural Creative Collective, which is going “to focus this passion and attention in the right direction”—promoting arts and culture, organizing concerts at Steve Cox Park, providing art and music lessons, and doing youth outreach. “We have the chance to build something unique,” Reed says. “A true voice of White Center.”
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
