Yoon: Create commission to overhaul structure of city government

Yoon would create a board, with subpoena powers, to investigate possible wrongdoing by Boston Police. The board would then make recommendations to the police commissioner on any actions.

Yoon said "there are stories upon stories [about problems], a lot of them coming out of the African-American community, cases of abuse or unsolved crimes."

The purpose of the board would not be to condemn police but as part of a process that would work to restore community trust in the department that has, he said, eroded over the years. He pointed to a guy he saw driving around Roxbury the other day in an SUV with a sign about how his son was killed and Boston Police won't talk to him.

In addition, Yoon also called for "a top to bottom review" of how the department is run and would work toward "a police department that looks like the face of Boston" in terms of diversity.

"It's a little premature" to say whether he would ask current Commissioner Ed Davis to stay on. He said he has a good relationship with Davis and that Davis has been a vocal advocate of the community policing he also supports.

Yoon said part of his municipal overhaul would be to seek a School Committee with some elected members.

"All of the [current] School Committee members individually are great, but they're not moving us to transformational change," and they're afraid to truly challenge the mayor like elected members would, unlike elected members, who could tell the mayor "I don't work for you and I'm going to challenge you on the issue."

He said he would still want to appoint some committee members to ensure all sorts of views and technical skills were represented.

And he said he would give individual schools and principals greater say in local school governance. As a former math teacher himself, he said truly good education comes from the efforts of the principals, teachers and parents in individual schools, not downtown.

He said BPS absolutely wasted several months trying to push a five-zone assignment system that could have been better spent on other issues. The energy expended on the now shelved plan was "a waste, a complete waste."

Yoon said there were two issues with the current PILOT program under which local non-profit concerns (and Massport) make payments to the city.

One is that nobody outside the mayor's office or the BRA (which Yoon would eliminate) knows how current payments get set - for example, why Harvard and Massport pay millions each year but Northeastern pays under $100,000. "That has to change," either by coming up with a set formula for determining payment amounts or by opening up the whole process to public scrutiny.

The other is the question of whether, in the aggregate, they are paying enough. Yoon said City Hall secrecy again means nobody knows for sure, but his sense is that they should be paying more - even if you throw in "in kind" contributions, such as scholarships and public access to non-profit facilities.

Adam Pieniazek, a Web-site developer by trade, asked Yoon if government could learn anything from the open-source movement.

Yoon said definitely. "Information in this day and age should be free and open to all. There's a real pragmatism behind that. ... The wisdom of crowds." He pointed to DataSF, a site that lets developers download all sorts of key data about San Francisco, so that they can build new applications to measure city performance.

And he said he would install a 311 system, to give residents an easier number to remember, and one where calls don't end with a reminder of the mayor's name and to give the city a better way to measure its performance. He said replacing the current ten-digit number with 311 would quickly pay for itself through increased efficiencies based on analyzing the results of responses to calls.