An appellate court judge has upheld Seattle’s payroll tax, affirming a decision made in King County Superior Court last year.

In an opinion published Tuesday, the Division I Court of Appeals deemed Seattle’s JumpStart tax lawful, The Seattle Times reported.

“Engaging in business is a substantial privilege on which the city may properly levy taxes,” the opinion reads. “And the use of a business’s payroll expense is an appropriate measure of that taxable incident.”

The tax, passed by the Seattle City Council in 2020, requires businesses with at least $7 million in annual payroll to pay between 0.7%-2.4% on salaries and wages paid to Seattle employees who make at least $150,000 per year. The highest rate is applied to salaries of at least $400,000 at companies with at least $1 billion in annual payroll.

In 2021, the tax brought $231 million in revenue to the city.

The lawsuit, filed by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce in December 2020, asked the King County Superior Court to strike down the tax, calling it illegal.

The lawsuit was dismissed by a King County Superior Court judge last summer, and the chamber appealed the decision.

The chamber in a statement Tuesday said it will review the latest decision and determine their next step with members and attorneys.

An Illinois tax agency has ruled that former President Donald Trump is due a $1 million refund on the 2011 tax bill for his downtown Chicago skyscraper, but local officials are trying to block the refund.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that at issue is the Cook County Board of Review’s estimation of the value of the the Trump International Hotel & Tower’s rooms and retail space. In June, the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board voted 5-0 to reduce the assessment on the building’s commercial property.

The vote means that Trump is owed $1.03 million, money that would come out of the property taxes due the city of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools and several other government agencies. The Cook County State’s Attorney is disputing the refund and has filed a lawsuit with the Illinois Appellate Court in the hopes of blocking it.

The dispute is the latest chapter in a long-running legal battle over Trump’s tax bills that started more than 12 years ago and has led to more than $14 million in tax breaks for Trump. It also involves not only a former president who is at the middle of a host of legal battles but a Chicago alderman whose own legal troubles had been making headlines in Chicago for months.

Alderman Edward M. Burke, whose former law firm, Klafter & Burke, won the tax breaks for Trump, has been indicted on federal charges that he blocked businesses from getting city permits unless they hired the firm. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

The dispute over the tax bills on the high-rise building has it’s own long history. Originally, the state agency rejected Trump’s argument that the vacant stores had no value because he could not find any tenants to lease them. A hearing officer for the state agency rejected Trump’s argument that the vacant stores at the building had no value because he couldn’t lease them. But a staff member later wrote a report that Trump was entitled to the refund.

The agency delayed acting on the case until Trump was out of office and in June voted to reduce the assessment on the building’s commercial property.

A former Washington state auditor has exhausted his appeals and now faces a 366-day federal prison sentence after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for review of his case.

That denial Monday represented the last avenue of appeal for Troy Kelley, who has been fighting his 2017 conviction for possession of stolen property, tax fraud and making false statements, The Northwest News Network reported.

”It is past time for Mr. Kelley to begin his prison sentence,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman in a statement.

The case against Kelley stemmed from his work in the real estate services industry before his election as state auditor in 2012.

Kelley, who previously served as a state lawmaker, was accused of keeping millions in fees that should have been refunded to escrow company customers. Later, prosecutors said, Kelley tried to hide the money by moving it through wire transfers while also creating an off-shore trust in Belize.

Kelley’s first trial in 2016 ended with the jury deadlocked on all but one count, on which he was acquitted. Federal prosecutors tried him again in 2017 and won convictions for several of the charges, but he was acquitted of money laundering.

Kelley was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and a year of supervised release, far less than prosecutors sought.

Kelley and his attorneys appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, eventually, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In their request for Supreme Court review, Kelley’s lawyers said his case raised two constitutional questions: whether someone can properly be convicted of possession of stolen property for breach of contract and whether his conviction violated the prohibition on imprisonment for debt.

The U.S. government waived its right to file a response to Kelley’s petition. That the Supreme Court declined to take his case is not unexpected.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided this month that the presidency isn’t a shield against a New York prosecutor’s criminal investigation, the justices didn’t say whether the same goes for civil suits against the president in state courts.

That has quickly become a question in two closely watched defamation lawsuits filed by women who say President Donald Trump smeared them while denying their sexual assault allegations.

Lawyers for the women, E. Jean Carroll and Summer Zervos, are now trying to persuade New York courts that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling  strengthens their arguments for letting the suits go forward. Trump’s attorneys are contending just the opposite.

The dispute comes with one of the cases now before New York’s highest court, which is weighing whether a sitting president is constitutionally protected from being sued in state courts.

“The answer is no” under the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning, Zervos attorneys Beth Wilkinson and Moira Penza wrote in a letter Friday to the top-level state Court of Appeals.

Rejecting President Donald Trump’s complaints that he’s being harassed, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in favor of a New York prosecutor’s demands for the billionaire president’s tax records. But in good political news for Trump, his taxes and other financial records almost certainly will be kept out of the public eye at least until after the November election.

In a separate case, the justices kept a hold on banking and other documents about Trump, family members and his businesses that  Congress has been seeking for more than a year. The court said that while Congress has significant power to demand the president’s personal information, it is not limitless.

The court turned away the broadest arguments by Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department that the president is immune from investigation while he holds office or that a prosecutor must show a greater need than normal to obtain the tax records. But it is unclear when a lower court judge might order the Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena to be enforced.

Trump is the only president in modern times who has refused to make his tax returns public, and before he was elected he promised to release them. He didn’t embrace Thursday’s outcome as a victory even though it is likely to prevent his opponents in Congress from obtaining potentially embarrassing personal and business records ahead of Election Day.

In fact, the increasing likelihood that a grand jury will eventually get to examine the documents drove the president into a public rage. He lashed out declaring that “It’s a pure witch hunt, it’s a hoax” and calling New York, where he has lived most of his life, “a hellhole.”

The documents have the potential to reveal details on everything from possible misdeeds to the true nature of the president’s vaunted wealth – not to mention uncomfortable disclosures about how he’s spent his money and how much he’s given to charity.

The rejection of Trump’s claims of presidential immunity marked the latest instance where his broad assertion of executive power has been rejected.

Trump’s two high court appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, joined the majority in both cases along with Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices. Roberts wrote both opinions.

“Congressional subpoenas for information from the President, however, implicate special concerns regarding the separation of powers. The courts below did not take adequate account of those concerns,” Roberts wrote in the congressional case.

Washington’s Supreme Court has denied Seattle’s bid to reinstate an income tax on wealthy households.

In a majority decision, the Supreme Court on Thursday declined to review the city’s request to overturn rulings against the tax by a King County Superior Court judge and the state Court of Appeals, The Seattle Times reported.

Without issuing an opinion, Supreme Court dismissed Seattle’s petition for review and a petition written by the Economic Opportunity Institute, a Seattle-based progressive think tank.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to report the tally and how each justice voted.

The ruling means Washington and its cities will remain barred from enacting graduated income taxes, with different rates based on wealth. But some advocates may still see a way to move forward, because the Supreme Court let stand a decision by the Court of Appeals last year to void a state law that banned taxes on net income.

“Seattle has the authority to adopt an income tax, and I believe we can craft a proposal that can help make our tax system less regressive,” Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a statement Friday.

“We are once again confronted with the reality that in times of crisis, those same residents that earn or have the least are the first to feel economic stings of job loss and instability,” Durkan added. “As we emerge from this emergency all of us need to rebuild a city that is more just and equitable.”

Washington is one of the few states without an income tax, and its system has been labeled by tax reformers as the most regressive, meaning poor residents pay a much higher percentage of their earnings than do rich residents.

President Donald Trump does not have to disclose his tax returns to appear as a candidate on California’s primary ballot next spring, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday.

The law, the first of its kind in the nation and aimed squarely at Trump, violates a specification of the state constitution calling for an “inclusive open presidential primary ballot,” the court said.

“Ultimately, it is the voters who must decide whether the refusal of a ‘recognized candidate throughout the nation or throughout California for the office of President of the United States’ to make such information available to the public will have consequences at the ballot box,” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the 7-0 decision.

Trump has broken with tradition among presidential candidates by refusing to disclose his financial information.

A U.S. judge had temporarily blocked the state law in response to a different lawsuit, and the high court ruled quickly because the deadline to file tax returns to get on the primary ballot is next week.

The state Republican Party and chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson challenged the bill signed into law this year by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom because it singled out Trump.