"When I look around here, I look at this land today. I see more than dirt, I see more than trees."
Leon Staples Jr., the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe's District III Representative, said that standing on a stretch of shoreline that most people in Cass Lake still think of as the old football field. For decades, Cass Lake-Bena High School played there. Now it's a construction site, and if you've driven past it on Highway 2 this year, you've probably wondered what exactly is going up.
Here's the answer: a 42 million dollar wellness center, funded through one of the more unusual financing arrangements the Band says it has ever assembled, on land it spent nearly seven years working to secure.
What's actually going in the ground
Groundbreaking happened on May 28, 2025. The project is expected to open in early 2027, which means Cass Lake residents are currently living through the middle stretch of a build that started well over a year ago and still has more than a year to go. That's a long runway for a town this size, and it's worth knowing what's coming at the end of it.
According to Tribal Health Director Doris Jones, the finished building will include:
- Basketball courts and open gymnasiums
- A swimming pool
- A medical clinic
- Physical and occupational therapy space
- A nurse practitioner focused specifically on elder care and type 2 diabetes
That last item matters. This isn't just a rec center with a pool bolted on. The Band has been explicit that the building is meant to function as a health facility first, with recreation as one piece of a larger picture that includes behavioral health and elder services under one roof.
The money behind it, and why it's bigger than one building
The 42 million dollar figure isn't just for the Cass Lake site. Secretary-Treasurer Lenny Fineday broke down the financing at the groundbreaking: roughly 20 million dollars in state cash bonding, several million more in new market tax credits, and about 14 million dollars in Indian Health Service 105(l) lease funds. Combined, that package covers the Cass Lake wellness center, a new facility in the Ball Club community, and an expansion of the Kego Lake Community Center.
Fineday called the arrangement something that, to his knowledge, had never been put together quite this way before. Whether or not that claim gets tested elsewhere, it tells you something about the scale of what's happening here. This wasn't a single grant application. It was a multi-year financing puzzle involving state bonding dollars, federal lease funds, and tax credit financing, all pointed at three different communities at once, with Cass Lake getting the largest single piece.
Why it took seven years to get here
The land itself has a longer story than the ribbon cutting suggests. Fineday has said the idea traces back to a conversation in December 2018 with then-District III Representative LeRoy Staples Fairbanks III, who approached him about a parcel the school district still controlled and suggested it as a wellness center site. From there, according to Fineday, it took a land swap and coordination across multiple departments to get the property fully into Band hands.
That's nearly seven years between the first conversation and the groundbreaking ceremony. If you've ever wondered why a piece of shoreline sat unused or underused for years before construction equipment finally showed up, this is often the answer: the visible work is the fast part. The land assembly is the slow part, and it usually happens well out of public view.
This isn't the Band's first time taking over a Cass Lake fixture
The wellness center is the highest-dollar project on the shoreline right now, but it's not the first time the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe has stepped in to keep a local institution running rather than let it close or change hands to an outside buyer. In October 2021, the Band purchased Teal's Market, a grocery store that had operated in Cass Lake since 1942 and stayed in the Teal family for four generations. Roger Teal, the store's owner at the time of the sale, said the decision to sell was difficult after nearly 80 years in the community, but that the Band was "a natural fit to carry on." The store reopened almost immediately as Leech Lake Market, kept its existing staff, and kept the same hours.
Put next to each other, the pattern is hard to miss. The Band already owns and operates Cedar Lakes Casino-Hotel and Leech Lake Supply Company in Cass Lake, along with Leech Lake Express convenience stores. Add a grocery store in 2021 and a 42 million dollar wellness campus arriving in 2027, and the Band has become one of the largest employers and property developers in town, not through acquisition of failing businesses, but through a consistent pattern of stepping in on shoreline and Main Street institutions that matter to daily life here.
What "shoreline restoration" means in practice
The Band's own materials describe the wellness center project as marking a step toward shoreline restoration alongside the health services piece. That's worth sitting with for a second. The old football field sat right on the water. Whatever comes next for that stretch of shoreline, it will look different from a fenced-off athletic field, and the Band has framed the change as intentional rather than incidental.
Architecture and construction on the project are being handled by LSE Architects and Kraus-Anderson Construction, working alongside the tribal council to bring Tribal Chair Faron Jackson Sr.'s stated goal into a physical building: a place, in his words, meant to promote "healthy ways of living" from childhood through elder years, in line with what he described as living in "that good Anishinaabe way."
Project Administrator Ben Benoit put it more plainly at the groundbreaking, when he said the goal was for the building not to be "just another building," but a place shaped by community input on what belongs inside it. QR codes at the ceremony pointed attendees to a survey asking exactly that.
What to watch for through 2027
If you live near Cass Lake, the practical takeaway is timing. The center is still under construction as of this fall, with an opening targeted for early 2027. That gives residents a little over a year to watch the shoreline continue to change shape, and it's worth checking in periodically rather than assuming the site will look the same next spring as it does right now.
For anyone tracking how the town itself is evolving, this project sits alongside other recent shifts on 2nd Street, where infrastructure has been catching up to a level of community activity that was already there. The wellness center is a different kind of change, larger in scale and slower in pace, but it points in the same direction: a town investing in its own shoreline and its own Main Street rather than watching either sit still.
You can find more on what's happening across Cass Lake, along with current listings and local context, on our Cass Lake neighborhood page.
If you're curious how a project like this might shape the feel of that stretch of shoreline once it opens, or just want to talk through what else is changing around Cass Lake, Team Cermak is always glad to grab coffee and compare notes.
