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Turning Yellowhead Trail into a freeway will cost Edmonton residents $510 million, including a 1.76 per cent dedicated property tax increase.

That increase will be phased in over the next 10 years as Edmonton ramps up construction on the total $1-billion project, city officials said while releasing the fine details of the project Thursday.

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The freeway has provincial and federal funding. But because those grants don’t cover land acquisition, splitting the tab three ways actually means Edmonton pays more than half.

“It’s just using a mortgage to fix a billion-dollar challenge,” said Mayor Don Iveson, defending the decision to go further into debt to pay for the infrastructure. “It’s spread out over a long period of time and it does deal with a significant congestion and traffic safety challenge that we have.”

City council is set to vote on the borrowing bill Tuesday.

Photo by Lori Waughtal / Postmedia

Residents want this issue fixed, Iveson said. They’re saying “the Yellowhead is a decades-overdue investment. There’s no time like the present to get moving on it and the sooner we can do it, the better we’ll be able to take advantage of this construction climate.”