Minneapolis Council Member Aurin Chowdhury brainstorms community safety ideas for Lake Street and south Minneapolis with her table at a community engagement meeting in the Powderhorn Recreation Center on March 27 in Minneapolis. (Angelina Katsanis/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Minneapolis will open a new community safety center at E. Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue later this year, officials announced recently.

Many details on what will be in the center are still being worked out, as is the opening date, which appears to be behind the city’s original schedule.

What’s new is the address — 2228 E. Lake St. — the facility’s hours of operation, and some of the services it will contain.

The philosophy behind the facility is to bolster community safety beyond traditional policing, by bringing social services and specialists, as well as police, to a stretch of Lake Street that has seen homelessness, drug use and crime become something of a new normal in recent years.

The building is expected to be temporary while the city develops a permanent and expanded community safety center adjoining the future Third Precinct police station at 2655 Minnehaha Av. That facility will serve the broader south Minneapolis area.

Both buildings are replacing facilities that burned in riots following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in 2020; the original Third Precinct station was overrun and set ablaze by a mob, and the storefront Midtown Safety Center at E. Lake Street and Chicago Avenue also burned during the unrest.

Lake Street details

The new center — in the shadow of Minnehaha Avenue and the light-rail overpasses — will occupy space rented by the city, according to a briefing officials provided to a City Council committee last week. The cost and other terms of the lease had not been finalized and were not public yet.

Mayor Jacob Frey’s administration had previously indicated the facility would be open early this summer. But in a recent interview Public Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette said his “best guess” was “by the end of the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter” of this year.

It will be open five days a week: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays, Tuesday and Fridays, and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. The evening hours are intended to reflect the walk-in center’s ability to serve residents after normal working hours.

The entire list of workers who will staff the building — and exactly what services will be available to people who walk in — hasn’t been worked out yet, officials said, but some are known.

The building will include two 311 agents, an undetermined number of crime prevention specialists and police officers. “Community navigators,” a representative of the City Attorney’s Office, and behavioral crisis workers are also envisioned.