Sills Sees Cultural Groups Periled by Tax Reform Plan

WASHINGTON — New York City Opera director Beverly Sills said today that the Treasury Department’s tax overhaul plan, if enacted, would destroy educational and arts institutions and prove to be “the single major catastrophe of our time.”

Her criticism was aimed at the Treasury’s proposal to remove tax incentives for all but the wealthiest charitable donors.

Sills served on a White House task force in 1981 which recommended tax incentives aimed at encouraging the private sector to increase its financial support of the arts. “The next thing we hear there is a proposal for tax reform that unfortunately was just exactly the reverse direction,” she told the Council on Foundations, an association of grant-making organizations.