SALEM — It was a full-court press.

There's no other way to describe the campaign waged by local officials to build a new courthouse on Federal Street. It began more than a decade ago and continued right up to last Monday, when Mayor Stanley Usovicz, state Rep. John Keenan, D-Salem, and Judge Robert Cornetta, the presiding justice at Salem District Court, went to the Statehouse to meet with Gov. Mitt Romney and Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.

Usovicz and the other local officials had been into Boston just days earlier, only to have the meeting postponed due to the London bombings. But a few days later, they were back again.

When plans were announced yesterday to build a $106 million court complex in Salem, state officials singled out the Salem Partnership, a business lobby that made the courts a priority. They were impressed, they said, by the number of key city leaders making a case for the courts.

"I really don't think there is another community with such cooperation and such a spirit of getting the job done," said David Perini, the commissioner of the Division of Capital Asset Management, the state agency that will build the new courthouse.

The Partnership, which is headed by Joseph Correnti, a Salem lawyer, established a court committee in the early 1990s and named a heavy hitter as chairman — Kevin Burke, who was then the Essex County district attorney. Over the years, Partnership members made repeated trips to the Statehouse to lobby for funds.

In 1998, the Partnership celebrated when Gov. Paul Cellucci came here to sign a courthouse bond bill. Salem, however, got little of the money.

The campaign to include Salem in a new bond bill heated up last year during the final term of Salem state Rep. J. Michael Ruane, who had fought for years for this project.

Working closely with Ruane, the Partnership last summer hosted the special House Committee on Courthouse Construction and Funding, which was touring the state to decide which projects to back.

Not long after, funds for the Salem court project were put into a bond bill. As a tribute to Ruane, the House committee proposed that the new complex be named the "J. Michael Ruane Judicial Center."

The final shape of the court complex and the decision to build one large mega-courthouse were the handiwork of Robert Mulligan, chief justice for administration and management of the state courts. Earlier plans had called for renovating all the Salem courts, some of which are more than 100 years old, but Mulligan considered those too costly and inefficient.

His goal, Mulligan said, was simple: "Let's get everybody in one building."

Senate Majority Leader Fred Berry, D-Peabody, was also singled out for credit yesterday. In an interview, Berry said the city's united front deserves the ultimate credit.

"We've been chasing this dog for a long time," he said. "... I think they recognized the true consensus in Salem. In other cities, there are segments of support, divided support, but I think Salem presented this kind of unity that gave (the state) the confidence to go on with the project."