Washington – Armed with decades-old documents and a fierce resolve, a Colorado widow who believes she has the right to stay in her Rocky Mountain National Park summer home pleaded her case Thursday before lawmakers.
Betty Dick, 83, told senators the government reneged on a 1979 agreement to let her stay at the house within the park’s boundaries.
“The contract I have with the government has never been honored, and I have never agreed to any change,” Dick testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Dick’s audience was small, with two senators attending the hearing.
The National Park Service says Dick’s 25-year lease on the homesite expired July 16. There was no resolution to Dick’s case Thursday, and one doesn’t appear imminent.
The Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, has offered to allow Dick to stay but only if her acreage is cut to between 3 and 5 acres from the current 23; if she pays roughly $1,000 a month instead of the $300 a year she now pays; and if the land reverts to the Park Service when Dick can no longer use it.
Earlier, Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., authored legislation to extend Dick’s lease with its current terms. A House version passed, but the Senate bill’s future looks troubled. The Republican chairman of the subcommittee that took Dick’s testimony, Sen. Craig Thomas of Wyoming, pointed out Thursday that the Park Service contract affirms a 25-year lease.
Dick has rejected the more restrictive Park Service offer as “sort of a last- minute attempt on their part to, I think, slow down this legislation.”
Barring a new agreement, Dick has permission to stay in the house through September. She lives in a Scottsdale, Ariz., retirement home in the fall, winter and spring.
Wearing a navy-and-white patterned skirt and jacket and low-heeled navy pumps, Dick told lawmakers that the government agreed to give her and her husband, Fred, who is now deceased, lifetime use of the land.
That agreement was not a lease but a settlement of a lawsuit filed after Fred Dick’s first wife sold the land to the government without giving him his first right to buy it, Betty Dick said.
Salazar called the Dick case a “bait and switch” by the government and presented documents during the hearing that he said prove it.
The couple visited Washington and met with lawmakers to try to settle the case in 1979. Salazar introduced a Nov. 26, 1979, memo from a National Park Service official that showed a “life estate” was suggested as a compromise.
A 1978 court document dismissing Fred Dick’s lawsuit against his first wife, Marilyn, and the government also stipulates that Fred and Betty Dick were granted “a life estate” on the land.
However, when final documents arrived from the government in spring 1980 with the terms of the agreement, Dick testified, they stated that the lease was for 25 years.
“As it turned out, Fred would not live so long that there would be a difference between a life estate and a term of 25 years,” Dick told senators. “But I am still here, and it makes a difference to me.”
Salazar said he would keep trying to work out a solution to help Dick.
The U.S. House has passed a bill authored by Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo.
But Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., favors a wide-ranging solution to the nearly 300 cases of people’s leases expiring in 30 national parks nationwide, his spokeswoman has said.
Staff writer Anne C. Mulkern can be reached at 202-662-8907 or amulkern@denverpost.com.
