Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Two municipalities renamed

Announced in the Royal Gazette on February 2, two municipalities have changed their name. In both cases the name was originally same as the corresponding subdistrict and is now modeled after the name of the district, as both form the major (or only) municipality within the district. Since both date back to sanitary districts, they only cover parts of the subdistrict. So though it is not stated anywhere, this also opens the possibility to upgrade the TAO responsible for the non-municipal areas of the subdistrict into a municipality later without having to change the name then.

The two municipalities renamed are
Both renaming have been decided upon in the board meeting 60/2009 on November 19. Seems like I browsed through that transcript a bit too fast when it was placed on the website, as I only notice this point in the agenda now I explicitly searched for it.

4 comments:

Brian said...

You make frequent reference to "TAO" on this blog but I can't find it used elsewhere. Originally I thought it might mean Tambon (or Tesaban) Administrative area, but now I'm not so sure. Its meaning may be very obvious, but maybe you could tell us what it stands for. I'd like to know the Thai name if that's possible.

Many thanks.

Andy said...

TAO is the abbreviation for Tambon Administrative Organization, also less often abbreviated as SAO (Tambon = Subdistrict). In Thai องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล, or short อบต (Oh Bo To). It is the local government entity one level below municipalities, and usually covers a whole subdistrict. Not to be confused with the Thesaban Tambon or subdistrict municipality, which is one level higher.

Since blogspot now allows to do static pages additional to the normal postings, it would a good idea to create a glossary of recurrent terms for those readers not familiar with all the details.

Brian said...

Thanks for the explanation. You've made it much clearer for me, but I'm still wondering how widely this English abbreviation is used, especially as it is an abbreviation of the English and not the Thai name. Using immigration offices (สำหนักงานตรวจคนเข้าเมือง) as an example, they are frequently referred to as ตม or T.M.

Anyway, good post and I look forward to seeing a glossary when you have time.

Andy said...

For the glossary see here.

TAO is found often in English texts, for example in academic papers, less often the term SAO is found. For more on these two acronyms, see this post.