BELLEVUE, Nebraska — The roar of jet engines returned to Offutt Air Force Base at 2:08 p.m. Friday, on a new runway that took more than a decade to fund and fully rebuild.

Congress and the Air Force spent $172 million remaking the 80-year-old runway. They spent another $45 million moving the 55th Wing to Lincoln, where it was based during 18 months of construction.

But getting the Air Force to acknowledge the runway’s problems and prioritize a full rebuild took 15 years or more of Nebraskans meeting with Air Force brass and bird-dogging the military budget.

Over that span, the project climbed from one aimed at setting aside millions of dollars for patchwork repairs to one that weighed a plan to partially repave the runway to one that embraced building it all over again.

Past and present members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation and others spoke to the Nebraska Examiner in recent days about the work it took to secure a new 12,000-foot runway.

Read the full story here.