A $50 million, five-year campaign to nearly double the size of the North Dakota Heritage Center was unveiled before a gathering of the faithful Monday.

"We need to get started," said Merl Paaverud, director of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, who used phrases like "grand" and "first class" to describe expansion plans.

The design would add three large galleries to the east of the existing structure, and a new main entry would face State Street. The present building offers 140,000 square feet, and the expansion would add another 125,000 square feet.

The anticipated funding sources would be 20 percent private, 20 percent federal and 60 percent state.

In addition to new gallery space, the expansion would include a 50-seat digital auditorium, climate-controlled storage areas, a cafe, children's gallery, expanded visitors service and store, and the "Corridor of History," a 25-foot-wide walkway the length of the expansion with a glassed southern exposure on one side and high tech DVD murals on the other.

The proposal is part of a 10-year development plan. The first phase of the plan - a $5.7 million expansion of the "legally mandated" state archives, investments in regional historic sites, investments in county and tribal historical resources and Lewis and Clark - has been completed or is underway. The second phase calls for the expansion of the Heritage Center, additional history professionals and investments in state-of-the-art technologies.

The seed for the development plan was a meeting of North Dakota's six living governors in 2001. They were, and remain, William Guy, Arthur Link, Allen Olson, George Sinner, Edward Schafer and John Hoeven. The governors, former and otherwise, together pushed for expansion, and Gov. Hoeven established a commission to prepare a report for the Legislature.

"We want to rollover from Lewis and Clark to an all-out heritage tourism effort," Paaverud said. Tourism, he reminded the audience, was the state's second largest industry and heritage tourism plays a big part in that. "We want a first class operation, one that's astounding and beautiful," he said.

Virginia Nelson, executive director of the SHSND Foundation, said that a feasibility study prepared for the project showed $5-6 million would be available from private sources, and local fundraisers felt they could do perhaps as much as $12 million.

"We have the platform, we just have to enhance it," Nelson said. "It will be kind of like a Smithsonian on the prairie."

Nelson and Paaverud were working the crowd, mostly trustees, to help get the word to legislators and others that might aid in the cause.

The proposal will face tough questioning in the Legislature, which will meet in January 2007. Nelson said she expected it to take more than one session to complete the legislative work required.

The design concepts were done by Lightowler Johnson Associates of Fargo, in partnership with HGA Architecture, Engineering and Planning of Minneapolis, a firm that specializes in museums.

The architecture of the expansion will blend with the existing structure, which was done 25 years ago by the Bismarck firm AWBW.