Topeka ? A bill that Congress passed Tuesday funding the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year includes the final funding needed to complete an animal disease research facility at Kansas State University in Manhattan, K-State officials said.

Ron Trewyn, NBAF liaison for the university, said the bill includes the final $300 million needed to complete the $1.15 billion National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility, or NBAF.

That project, which is being jointly funded by the state and federal government, has been in the works since about 2007. But it has been stalled because of cost overruns and budget stalemates in Congress.

Trewyn said initial site work where the research lab will be located has already been completed, and a power plant to serve the facility is about 90 percent complete. With the final funding now in place, he said, construction on the laboratory itself is expected to begin in late May or early June.

Kansas competed with several other states to house the facility, which is expected to create more than 300 new jobs in the area, with an economic benefit of $2.4 billion over 25 years.

In January, state officials made a conditional agreement to issue another $231 million in bonds to cover the state’s 25 percent share of the cost. That brought the state’s total investment to $307 million.

That deal was conditioned on a final agreement being signed between the state and DHS, with assurances that the state would not be asked to contribute any more money, and that the facility would actually be built.

That was during a time when Congress was at odds with President Barack Obama over his immigration policy, and lawmakers withheld full funding for Homeland Security, opting instead to pass a stop-gap continuing resolution to fund the agency for only two months while talks continued over immigration.

Many state officials said at the time that the final funding for NBAF was included in that continuing resolution. But Trewyn said Tuesday that the stop-gap bill only included instructions, not the money, for DHS to move forward on the project.

The bill that finally passed Congress on Tuesday includes $974 million through 2019 for science and technology research. The language also provides that $300 million of that will be used for construction of NBAF.

Both U.S. senators and all four U.S. representatives from Kansas voted against that bill, mainly due to continued disagreements with the Obama administration over immigration policy.