Sunday, April 13, 2008

Ko Samui city status delayed

It was mentioned on the ThaiVisa forum quite some time ago, however Samui Express was a bit slow to put it up on their website. But now it is online - Surat governor rejects cityhood. According to that article the governor of Surat Thani province Vinai Baupradit has halted the plans of the upgrade to city status, claiming that the requirements aren't met yet.
Samui has also met the population and income requirements, as it has over 50,000 residents and its Bt10-billion annual income is past the required Bt400 million or more.
But strangely no word on the population density requirement, as far as I know the area also needs to have a population density of at least 3,000 per square kilometre to qualify for a city (same for the town status). For subdistrict municipalities this limit is at 1,500 per km² - but this is hardly ever reached in the recent upgrades of TAO to municipalities, which cover the whole subdistrict (tambon), not just the densely settled area which had made municipal separately from the rest of the subdistrict in the past. So maybe the density requirement was dropped recently.

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