Councilor seeks key to public policy in budget

Yawu Miller

Right now, the most prominent feature in Sam Yoon’s City Council office are several binders containing details of the city’s 2006 budget sitting on a conference table.

“You gotta fill this room up,” quips Council President Michael Flaherty during an impromptu visit. “There’s an echo in here.”

Yoon, who has hired a staff of six, says he will soon have more desks filling the void in his concrete-walled City Hall office.

But his number one priority is the facts and figures filling the city budget binders.

“If we really want to make an impact in this city, we have to understand where the money is coming from and understand what we’re spending our money on,” Yoon says. “It’s something I’m committed to. Grappling with our city’s fiscal policy is really going to help the council and other citizens understand what we can accomplish in housing, in fixing our schools, in our public safety.”

The areas Yoon references — schools, housing, public safety — are the key areas virtually all city councilors and city council candidates regularly pledge to improve. Now that it’s Yoon’s turn at bat, he plans to call on his experience in two of those areas to help guide policy.

For the last ten years, much of Yoon’s work has been in housing. He worked as development director for the Asian CDC and before that as a project manager for Community Builders, the nation’s largest nonprofit affordable housing developer.

Yoon came to Boston in 1993 to attend Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. His master’s thesis was a development plan for Dudley Square that he conducted for the Dudley Square Merchants Association.

A former middle school math teacher, Yoon says his experience in the Elizabethtown, NJ school system has given him a good understanding of how schools work.

Currently, his three-and-a-half-year-old son attends the Lee Academy on Talbot Avenue in Dorchester, which gives him a personal stake in the school system’s performance.

At Princeton University, where he graduated in 1992, Yoon studied analytic philosophy — a school of thought which holds that everything in the universe can be understood by identifying a few underlying principles.

In City Hall, Yoon figures, at least one of the key principles may be extracted from the budget, which documents both expenditures and revenue sources. A better understanding of the balance sheet will benefit novice city councilors and taxpayers alike, Yoon reasons.

“We need to educate tax payers in the city of Boston about how their tax rate gets set and why it keeps going up each year,” he said. “People should know how the revenues get spent so that they can understand their financial participation in our schools, in our libraries, in road repairs.”

While the budget may be the key to Yoon’s approach to policy, much of the work of the council cannot be reduced to dollar amounts. As the first Asian American councilor in the city’s history, Yoon, who is Korean American, will likely be seen as the de-facto representative for the city’s Asian population.

Last week, when he attended a graduation ceremony for an adult English-as-a-second-language class at the Chinatown Neighborhood Center, the mostly Chinese American crowd gave him a hero’s welcome.

“They were so excited that I was there,” Yoon said. “It’s just a reminder of how important it is for me to be an honest, hard-working public servant. I’m an important symbol for the Asian community.”

Yoon received substantial electoral support from the city’s Chinese and Vietnamese communities and says he will serve as an informal liaison between Asian groups and other civic leaders. Last week he met with the head of a credit union who wants to open a branch in Castle Square, a South End housing development with a large Chinese population.

Having garnered a high percentage of votes in the city’s black and Latino communities, Yoon is also likely to be seen as a symbol for the city’s emerging minority voting power. His first vote cast in the council’s Ianella Chamber was for Councilor Charles Yancey’s failed bid for council president.

“It was the right thing to do,” he said.

After his fifth place finish in the preliminary election, the councilors of color invited Yoon to join their joint campaign organization, Team Unity. While he says he will remain loyal to his fellow councilors of color, Yoon said the councilors will not always vote in unison.

“I have my own independent judgment that I’m going to exercise on every issue,” he commented.