Executive Director Brian Ritter says the grant would help pay for a new building - for classrooms, labs, offices, and maintenance.
"And ultimately that new space would free up a tremendous amount of space in our existing building and make it more user friendly for visitors and education programming."
Ritter says a new building, and other projects such as more trails, would help Nahant Marsh deal with increasing numbers of visitors.
"So we had traffic counters and we estimate 46,000 cars will enter Nahant Marsh this year. And so if you extrapolate that, that's about 1.5 people per vehicle, so about 70,000 people potentially coming into the marsh every year."
The goal for the campaign is 3.7 million dollars, and nearly 3 million has been raised so far. He hopes to find out about the state grant by sometime in December.
