Are the Indiana Dunes for sale or not?

If one is in the market for a warehouse with a nice view of Lake Michigan, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore might be the place to look, or so it would seem according to a list of “excess warehouse space” listed for sale on the White House website.

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum instructing federal agencies to speed up the identification and sale of “excess properties.”

Somehow, more than 90,000 square feet of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was included on this list. It is not entirely clear why or how an area larger than one and a half football fields in the national lakeshore got included on this list.

An interactive map on the White House website lists 58 separate locations within the Indiana Dunes as warehouses that are no longer needed by the federal government.

Costa Dillon, superintendent of the Indiana Dunes, told the Duneland Community, a news organization near the national lakeshore, “we did not make the list and were not consulted.”

“We have no surplus property for sale,” Dillon said.

A technicality could be the reason parts of the Indiana Dunes were included on the list, Dillon told the news organization.

If the park purchases new property with an existing structure that the park has no use for, it has to classify the structure as “surplus property” in order to be able to remove it, Dillon said.

“This is merely a technical designation,” Dillon said. “Somehow, this was picked up as surplus federal property that could be sold.”

The White House said the properties could have been coded and placed on the website incorrectly.

The properties remain listed for sale.

— Zach Ammerman