BTW I played phone tag today with some air operations officer, I'll try
him again tomorrow. I was surprised he even called me back, his
secretary wasn't too pleasant. "Well if there's nothing in it for us we
aren't gonna let you do a practice approach, but we'll see what the air
ops officer says."

Sounds like you are trying this the civilian way by trying to get all
the top brass to agree to this. The military way would be to just fly
down there and ask the controller. If the controller is bored he'll
probably do it. We do practice approaches into Beale AFB and Travis
AFB around here and I've never known anyone to call ahead of time.
Worst case, they say no. Are you trying for a PAR approach??

-Robert