Quarter Design Commission Will Meet Next Week

Quarter Design Commission Will Meet Next Week
State officials will begin sifting next week through hundreds of suggested designs for North Dakota's commemorative state quarter, Lt. Gov. Jack Dalrymple says.

Nearly 400 ideas were submitted before last week's deadline. Dalrymple is chairman of a nine-member commission that will submit five design ideas to the U.S. Mint, which will translate them into proposed coin images. The final design will be chosen from the five finalists.

"It seems like the more ideas you get, the less clear you are about what you want to do," Dalrymple said. "The difficulty, I think, is going to be in coming up with something that is truly unique to our state."

The commission is meeting Tuesday to consider the ideas, and decide on a procedure for reviewing them, Dalrymple said.

The panel will establish a subcommittee to take the five favorite concepts, and try to "condense them and polish them up, possibly improve them a bit, and try to make the best narrative proposals that we can come up with," he said.

Dalrymple hopes the work will be completed by the end of August.

The effort is part of a U.S. Mint program, which began in 1999, to make special quarters for the 50 states. Twenty-eight state quarters have been issued so far, most recently for Texas, whose quarter features an outline of the state, a single star and the "Lone Star St