The White River Amphitheatre: a two-lane road, a tribe, and a rivalry with the Gorge

On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1997, nearly three dozen tractors pulled onto State Route 164 near Enumclaw and drove slowly. Pickup trucks and horse trailers went with them. The tractors carried signs against a concert venue the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe was building beside the White River, and the State Patrol and King County police had to detour traffic around them. The complaint was that the amphitheatre would jam the road. The protest, which was the point, jammed the road.

Most people who have sat in the line of taillights after a show at the White River Amphitheatre know some version of that fight: rural neighbors, a tribe, a two-lane highway, years of delay. The version on the record is stranger. The law firm the neighbors hired to fight the tribe was, the Seattle Times reported, the firm used by the company that ran the Gorge, the amphitheatre the tribe had set out to beat, and about three years after opening night the rivalry between the two venues ended in a sale.

A plan written against the slot machines

The idea is older than the casino. According to the Seattle Times, the tribe first proposed the amphitheatre in 1989, as part of an economic plan for its reservation lands near Auburn, and set it aside while it opened the Muckleshoot Casino in 1995. By July of that year it had signed with Bill Graham Presents, the San Francisco promoter, and was describing a 25,000-seat venue on a bluff over the river. The Times reporter Danny Westneat put the motive plainly: "Worried about being dependent on gambling money, leaders of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe are busy trying to turn their reservation east of here into a regional entertainment mecca."

The target was never a secret. Gregg Paisley, the tribe's economic development director, said the Gorge at George had primitive facilities and was too far from Seattle for a weeknight show. "Seattle is one of the few major cities around that doesn't have a large outdoor concert venue," he said. The 1995 plan also included a 15-acre Muckleshoot Park beside the stage, with a campground, a cultural center and a museum.

The tribe's comptroller, Jerry Henke, gave the long view in 1997. "Gambling is not going to be there forever," he told the Times. "And we also know that the services that the federal government provides will not be there forever."

Tractors on 164

Work began in June 1997 and within weeks stopped on part of the site. A consultant had taken a fence for the property line; the real boundary was 30 to 40 feet farther south, and 0.6 acres of wetland on the bluff had been cleared. The tribe halted work on that part of the site on its own, in anticipation of an order from the Army Corps of Engineers. Its attorney, Rob Otsea, called it "sort of a self-imposed stopwork order."

By November the price was put at $20 million and the neighbors had organized. Citizens for Safety and Environment, started by Jill Jensen's family and others, claimed several hundred members and worried about tired, drunk concertgoers on narrow, curving roads. "This is a life-and-death matter," said Brent Warwick, an Enumclaw resident. "Death of a lifestyle." Councilman Kent Pullen proposed a one-year county moratorium. County Executive Ron Sims met with tribal leaders and with the mayors of Enumclaw and Auburn. Representative Jennifer Dunn wrote to President Clinton asking him to order a federal environmental review, and said construction was going ahead "despite an alarming lack of environmental review."

There was a real legal question under the noise. The site was land the tribe owned inside its reservation, but it was fee land, not land held in trust by the United States. The Supreme Court had let counties regulate some reservation land outside trust, and the Times reported that King County would be "moving into uncharted legal territory" if it tried. The tribe said it would sue in federal court, arguing that local rules on reservation land infringed on its sovereignty and its treaty. A tribal spokesman, John Loftus, said the tribe was working with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Army Corps and "a half-dozen county departments in addition to our own environmental experts."

The fax

Then there was the lawyer. In the same November 1997 story, Lynne K. Varner of the Seattle Times reported that the citizens group had "retained Bricklin & Gendler, the law firm used by Universal Concerts, which operates the Gorge." Bill Graham Presents, which was to run the tribe's venue, was Universal's rival.

There was also a fax. The group's attorney, David Bricklin, had sent one to the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the group's behalf, and Varner reported that "the name Universal Concerts was written on top of the cover sheet." Six years later, as the venue got ready to open, the Times reported that House of Blues, by then the Gorge's owner, and the opposition group had the same attorney, Bricklin, "who's continuing to fight the facility." The same story described the two concert companies as rivals and said "an industry rivalry has been playing out over White River for more than a decade." Jill Jensen told the Times in 1997 that the group's choice of attorney was coincidental and unrelated to Universal Concerts. Nothing this site found shows otherwise, and nothing in the record suggests the neighbors' fears about their road were anyone's but their own.

Four years of paperwork

In April 1998 the tribe voluntarily stopped work again, this time for a federal environmental review, a decision the Times said was hastened by pressure from Senator Slade Gorton. That month, at a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing in Tukwila on Gorton's bill to end tribal sovereign immunity, the tribal chairman, John Daniels Jr., defended immunity while his tribe's unfinished amphitheatre was being cited as one reason the bill was needed.

A federal court order of April 17, 1998, in a case the citizens brought against Bill Graham Enterprises, put the Bureau of Indian Affairs in charge of an environmental impact statement. The notice published in the Federal Register in April 2002 describes the question: whether to take 324 acres of "tribally owned fee land" into trust, and whether the Corps should allow wetland fill. The alternatives it weighed included tearing out the half-finished buildings and restoring the site. The notice gave the purpose as meeting the need for an "economically competitive performing arts center for the greater Seattle-Tacoma concert market and a place for cultural, educational and community events for the Tribe."

Federal permits came through and work resumed in September 2002. In February 2003 the state transportation department approved four connections to SR 164 between Southeast 400th and 408th streets. A suit filed that March in King County Superior Court tried to block the access permit.

Opening night

The White River Amphitheatre opened on June 14, 2003, with Heart. The estimate of $17 million from 1997 had become $30 million. The Times counted 8,500 seats under a roughly triangular roof and room for about 11,500 more on the lawn, on an 80-acre site that had been a cow pasture, with a large canoe sculpture at the entrance and parking for 6,800 cars. The first season was booked to run from Ozzfest and Fleetwood Mac to Lollapalooza and Aerosmith with Kiss. Otsea had put the point years earlier, when the tribe picked its promoter: "We wanted something we could be proud of, and be known for something more than just the casino."

One company, two stages

Clear Channel, which had absorbed Bill Graham Presents, spun its concert business off as Live Nation. In July 2006 House of Blues, which by then owned the Gorge, agreed to be bought by Live Nation for $350 million. The Wenatchee World put it in one sentence: "The Gorge competed directly for ticketbuyers with Live Nation's White River Amphitheater in Auburn, the closest 20,000-seat outdoor concert venue in the Northwest." After the sale, it did not. The venue built to beat the Gorge and the Gorge itself were booked by the same company, and still are.

The traffic outlived the rivalry. On the way to a Journey show in July 2014, one ticket holder told MyNorthwest that the last 12 miles took five hours, and that she made a U-turn at the gate as Journey was finishing. "There were 20,000 people that showed up for that concert and it really tipped the scales," Auburn's community development and public works director, Kevin Snyder, told KOMO in 2015. Live Nation hired traffic engineers and cut capacity from 20,000 to 16,000. In 2015 Auburn's advice for big nights pointed east: "We are going to try and encourage folks to go out to Enumclaw and back that way," Snyder said.

Seven miles east

Enumclaw is the back door. The venue's own guide now says there is no shuttle for any show. A state project to rework SR 164 in east Auburn, with $15 million from the 2015 Connecting Washington package and the tribe in the lead, is listed by the Washington State Department of Transportation as on hold. The amphitheatre is still open: Hayley Williams is booked for "The Hayley Williams Show" on September 30 and Luke Bryan, on a rescheduled date, for October 10, and Live Nation is already taking names for 2027 premium seats. The tribe's own site describes it as owned by the Muckleshoot Tribe and managed by Live Nation.

The tractors on 164 in 1997 were about a road, and the neighbors said so. Running beside their fight, as the Times put it in 2003, was a rivalry between two concert companies over the same patch of pasture. That one was settled in an office, not on the highway, and the answer was both. The road is still two lanes.