While Burien has been successful in annexing the southern half of White Center, Seattle’s powers-that-be have been reluctant to chew and swallow the unincorporated neighborhood’s more urban northern core. While this has allowed casino/bowling alley owners to breathe a sigh of relief, neighborhood residents hungry for the sort of services Seattle could offer–not the least of which would be an enhanced police presence as the historically hardscrabble neighborhood continues to hose itself down–there are still a plethora of “No Seattle Annexation” window and yard signs spread throughout the neighborhood. And yesterday, the Seattle City Council reminded everyone why.Faced with what Council Prez Richard Conlin described as a “large-scale crisis in transportation funding,” a council subcommittee voted to push a package that would expand the city’s taxing authority to the full council. If, as expected, it passes, the city would be able to hike parking taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, the fee for license tabs, and toll its own roads–at times with the permission of voters, at other times unilaterally.On one level, the city council’s willingness to broach the prospect of taxing the fuck out of its citizenry is a gutsy acknowledgment of the arctic fiscal crisis faced at virtually every level of government. (Okay, this being Seattle, which rarely meets a levy it doesn’t like, maybe “gutsy” is overstating things a bit.) But if you live in White Center, and you gaze across Roxbury Street only to realize your annexed neighbors don’t all have sidewalks and super-smooth roads either, you could be forgiven a state of sticker shock, no matter how much holistic sense expanding the big city’s boundaries makes.