DIRECTOR OF MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS SPEAKS OUT AS CITY OF BOSTON REQUESTS $250,000

The Art Newspaper’s Erica Cooke reports that the city of Boston is requesting a $250,000 from the Museum of Fine Arts as part of a payment that nonprofits have to pay “in lieu of taxes.” Even more distressingly to the museum, the city plans to quadruple the bill, to more than one million dollars, by 2016.

The rising payments are part of a program called Pilot, or Payment in Lieu of Taxes, recently updated by mayor Thomas Menino. Under Menino’s new plan, the city’s nonprofits owning property worth more than fifteen million dollars must now give the city 25 percent of what they would pay in taxes as a commercial enterprise. The museum previously paid under $70,000 a year. Meanwhile, the Institute of Contemporary Art is now being asked to pay $17,000, an amount that will grow to $86,000 by 2016.

“For 140 years we’ve been serving the city of Boston,” protested Malcolm Rogers, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts. “We are a huge economic generator for the city and that’s why there should be investment in the arts, not taxation.” Added Ford Bell, the president of the American Association of Museums, “To say, ‘now we are going to tax them, but we’re not going to call it a tax,’ is very disingenuous.” Because nonprofits are exempt from taxes, the Pilot payments are technically voluntary. But as Cooke notes, any organization that resisted payments would put its working relationship with the city at risk.