Municipal Constituency definition

Last week the first 2011 announcement of those I monitor was published in the Royal Gazette, which was about the constituency definitions for the municipal council elections in Khao Wua-Phloi Waen subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลเขาวัว-พลอยแหวน), Tha Mai district, Chanthaburi province. While this kind of announcements does not give much of information for me - especially as the boundaries are defined in words only without any map, nor much reverence to the village numbers included - one aspect of this publication is worth noting.

The announcement was signed December 21 2010 by Election Commission President Aphichat Sukhakkhanon (อภิชาติ สุขัคคานนท์), so they were published rapidly after being approved. However, the municipality was already created effective July 31 2009, thus almost one and half year after the upgrade of the TAO and the end of term of the TAO council there wasn't yet any election of a new council and mayor. I earlier programmed a small function which calculates the times between the board meeting and the corresponding constituency announcement, and this gives a mean time between the two of 188 days. Yet, in this case it was 542 days, which makes it the longest time between board meeting and constituency announcement, even 20 days more than the previous record from Bang Krathuek in Nakhon Pathom. Due to all the aborted TAO upgrades as well as some missing board meeting transcripts I cannot tell if there's currently any other municipality still waiting similarly long.

I have no idea what is the reason for these long delays, which of course prohibit the election of the new council and mayor after the upgrade. In some older constituency definitions the boundary was defined with the Muban numbers, and also in the few cases where the website of the municipality includes the constituency information it seems that usually the constituencies contain complete Muban. However for this none I have no idea if the constituency boundaries run along the Muban boundaries, but if that is the case the long time to define the constituencies would be even more surprising - as all it'd take then would be to create two groups of adjoining Muban with an approximately equal population.