Clock Ticking for Those With Piece of the Parks : Lands: When national refuges were created, residents often sold homes with the right to lease them back. But, as contracts near end, some resist leaving. Pending bill would let them stay.

Allan Galloway remembers a long night in 1986 when a stormy Lake Michigan lapped against the back doorstep of his cottage in the rural Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Since he built the one-story cottage in 1961, nature has moved the water’s edge 90 feet closer, submerging 15 pines in its way. But Galloway, 70, has always hung on.

Now, the year 2002 is beginning to lap at his back doorstep.

That’s when the federal government can kick him out of his house, under the terms of a lease he signed in 1977--a contract he now regrets.

“It was a generation that didn’t fight Uncle Sam,” Galloway said.

The National Park Service has similar lease agreements in 79 other parks--a third of its holdings--from Yosemite National Park in California to the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. Nationally, there are 1,495 such inholders, as they’re called.

“The older people get, the less they enjoy the idea of being taken out of an area,” Galloway said as he looked over the lake wrapped in early morning fog.

Shortly after the Sleeping Bear Dunes park was created in 1970, federal agents started buying up the private land inside its boundaries.

Galloway was told he had to sell his holdings to the government. But for 25% of the purchase price, he got a lease to continue living there for 25 years.

Now he is fighting to extend the lease, at least until he dies. And his wish is to pass the place on to his children.

The National Park Service believes it has waited patiently while the remaining inholders have finished out their leases tax-free.

“There is a contract between the Park Service and these landowners,” said Duane Pearson, assistant superintendent at Sleeping Bear Dunes. “The time is running nigh for a number of them.”

There are 143 non-lifetime leases in Sleeping Bear. Nearly half the leases expire in the next 3 1/2 years, with the rest running out by 2014. Nine residents hold lifetime leases in the park.

In his effort to stay on the property longer, Galloway and 75 of the other park inholders have hired a Washington lawyer to lobby Congress.

They are pushing a bill introduced in May by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose district includes the park. Stupak’s bill would extend the Sleeping Bear leases for 99 years.

“I’ve always heard the difficult stories--people felt they weren’t treated fairly by the then-Park Service, and it has been a sore point,” Stupak said.

The leases usually run between 10 years and a lifetime, said David Barna, a Park Service spokesman in Washington.

“These are people who were told they had to sell. Sometimes the Park Service condemned their property to get it. We do not honor contracts made under duress,” said Chuck Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Assn. in Battle Ground, Wash. The group fights for the rights of those owning or using property inside national parks, forests and wildlife preserves.

More than 1,500 landowners have already left Sleeping Bear, according to Park Service records. Their houses were generally auctioned off and carted away so the land would return to its natural state.

Pearson said it would be unfair if the government chose to extend leases for the remaining group. He said others who voluntarily left could demand a lease extension or return of their land.

Residents in the surrounding community resent the tax-free status of the inholders, noting that some of the cottages are rented out by owners who are away more often than not.

“The lease holders requesting extensions have had a very good free ride--with no property taxes, free fire, police protection, along with . . . repair and care of our roads,” Bessie J. Musil, the Cleveland Township treasurer, wrote Stupak.

If Stupak’s bill (HR 1666) passes, Galloway and the other inholders would start paying the local government for such services.