Wednesday, February 16, 2011

2009 TAO upgrades announced in Royal Gazette

Last Friday, a whole of 72 announcements were published in the Royal Gazette, all concerning upgrades of subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO) to subdistrict municipalities. If I am not mistaken, these are all dating back from 2009 and thus already effective for more than a year, however the announcements were all signed in October 2010. Whereas several of the few municipal changes decided in 2010 have been published timely in the Gazette already, this batch of announcements gives hope that the big backlog of similar notifications will still be processed and published.

In 2009 there were many more that just 72 changes - effective between October and December 2009 alone were 319, and another 59 in fiscal year 2009, which ran from October 2008 till September 2009. And also from earlier years most of the TAO upgrades haven't made it into the Royal Gazette yet, so there should be several more bunches of announcements like this forthcoming. I skip the tedious work of listing all those announced now in this posting, anyone interested can find them in XML format in my coding project.

All of the PDFs include the boundary definition and a map, though in some cases the map was scanned in such a low resolution it is no longer recognizable. I am still working through them to use those maps to identify the municipality office in Google Earth and add it into my automatically generated map, so far just 20 of the 72 maps are done.

As an example, the very first one on the upgrade of TAO Inthakin (อินทขิล) the map inside the PDF shows a location next to highway 107. In Google at around that location is has a small group of buildings next to a small reservoir, and also the "red dot" is placed around there, so one of the buildings must be the municipality office, most likely the one with the red roof.

View Larger Map

The location is confirmed by Longdo Map, and I might have found it there before if it weren't misspelled as อินทนิล originally.

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