CCAC chooses quarters

Even though members of the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee considered the American flag an essential feature for the 2017 Ellis Island National Monument quarter, at the end of the vote counting, the design with a tiniest flag carried the day.

Heidi Wastweet had earlier called the winning design (NJ-05A) a well balanced one with the three immigrants on the left balanced by the building on the right. She said buildings are important for the coin because they are all that’s left of the immigrant experience of a century and more ago.

Her evaluation persuaded the chair, Mary Lannin to say, “Heidi sold me on 5A.”

When the votes were counted, 5A garnered 19 points, while design NJ-10 had 12 and NJ-01A took 11. A slight variant of 1A had nine points.

The rest of the submissions in a field of 16 candidate designs hardly gained any points at all.

For the 2017 quarter honoring Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, it was a close race between a design showing the mounds and one that had a very well executed peregrine falcon.

When the tallies were announced, the mound design had 17 points to the faclon’s 14. The also rans were well behind.

When the Effigy Mounds designs were reviewed, Mike Moran called the one with the falcon the “best wildlife shield I’ve seen in 4-1/2 years on the committee.”

Obviously, the vote totals, others on the CCAC agreed with his assessment.

However, at the end of the process, it was design IA-09 that got the most points. It was also one that the Effigy Mounds superintendent, the liaison to the CCAC preferred.

Lannin welcomed two well known numismatists as new members of CCAC at the beginning of the meeting, Steve Roach, the former editor of Coin World and now its editor at large, and Dennis Tucker, publisher at Whitman.

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