City and state leaders gathered Monday to celebrate Veterans Day and honor those who have served, including former U.S. Sen. and Veteran James Mountain Inhofe, with the dedication of a brand-new Veteran Medical Center named in his honor.

The new James Mountain Inhofe Veterans Medical Center will serve as a vital health care resource for thousands of Veterans across Green Country, bringing expanded medical access closer to home.

FOX23 attended the special dedication ceremony to learn how the project, more than a decade in the making, came to fruition.

The center, part of the Veterans Health Administration, aims to provide quality health care and economic opportunity while reducing the need for Veterans to travel long distances for treatment.

City leaders, state officials, and local nonprofits partnered with OSU Health Sciences and the Veterans Hospital in Tulsa to make the medical center a reality. Last year, state lawmakers passed a bill officially naming the facility after Inhofe, honoring his decades of public service and military background.

The $181 million project was funded through a combination of the federal CHIP-IN for Vets Act and private donations. The 273,000-square-foot facility includes 58 hospital beds and will serve as a major resource for Veterans across the region.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford said the new center represents a model for how government and local organizations can work together to improve Veterans’ care.

“There’s always this challenge as Americans that we can do things better and we can. We’ve been working on being a perfect union in the beginning, but in the veterans area, you literally see from the very beginning in George Washington’s revolution army, ‘What were they going to do for veterans after that?’ That has happened every single year since then as a nation,” said Lankford. “This is one more step in that, this is not just veterans care in Green Country, this is a new model for the country of how this kind of medical care can be done to partner with other hospitals in the area, to share physicians, to share resources, to share technology, but also for nonprofits, the state, the county, the city and the federal government to partner together to be able to do it faster and more efficiently. That’s happened here, we literally proved here it can be done.”

According to the Veterans Hospital in Tulsa, the center will serve approximately 65,000 veterans who live in the Tulsa area.

While the inside of the facility remains under construction, officials say it is expected to be ready for patients by next summer.