By EDWARD HUSAR

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

The idea of building a multi-million-dollar Mississippi River Interpretive and Heritage Center in Quincy received encouragement from the director of the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa.

Teri Goodman was invited to speak about her operation at the Quincy Rotary Club's November meeting. While in town, she was taken on a tour of Quincy's riverfront and had good things to say about prospects for operating a successful interpretive center, said Quincy engineer Mike Klingner, a longtime friend of Goodman's.

"Her position is money is not a problem for these types of river museums because there's so much interest" in them from supporting groups, agencies and individuals, he said.

The Dubuque museum gets more than 250,000 visitors a year and welcomed its 1 millionth visitor in 2007. The museum also has 5,000 memberships to help support the not-for-profit venture, which include a major aquarium, hundreds of river-related exhibits and the Mississippi River Hall of Fame.

Klingner said the Dubuque museum didn't open until the organization raised all the money needed.

"It was very successful in gathering a lot of federal funds and state dollars," he said.

The museum met its initial goal of raising $40 million, with much of the support coming from private organizations and national and state agencies.

Now Goodman is in the midst of a campaign to raise another $80 million, Klingner said.

Klingner said Quincy's proposed project also would need to have considerable funding in place before it could get off the ground. He would like to see a large project undertaken because it would have a better chance of catching on as a tourist attraction, with entry fees then used to help finance ongoing operations.

"You have to do it in a major way," he said. "To have this thing successful, it can't be a little million-dollar museum. You've got to be looking big scale -- a $40 million to $50 million type facility -- to get it to be a star attraction."

-- ehusar@whig.com/221-3378