Municipal upgrades

Yesterday, two municipal upgrade were announced in the Royal Gazette.

• Lom Raet (เทศบาลเมืองล้อมแรด), Thoen district, Lampang upgraded from subdistrict municipality to town municipality effective January 9. [Gazette]
• Taluban (เทศบาลเมืองตะลุบัน), Sai Buri district, Pattani upgraded from subdistrict municipality to town municipality effective January 1. [Gazette]

There are several interesting things around these. At first, the announcements were signed on December 29, and unlike many other upgrades they became published just one month after becoming effective. Which is rather fast for the announcements I look into, and given that municipal changes sometimes get published years after becoming effective (or haven't been announced at all) this is quite surprising.

Also interesting is the fact that for Lom Raet the announcement is titled เปลี่ยนแปลงเขตเทศบาลตำบลล้อมแรด และเปลี่ยนแปลงฐานะเป็นเทศบาลเมืองล้อมแรด - change of area of subdistrict municipality Lom Raet and change of status to be town municipality Lom Raet. Lom Raet became a sanitary district in 1955, which was enlarged two times in 1963 and 1973, and like all sanitary district became a subdistrict municipality in 1999. The 1973 announcement as the latest area definition still had only the central parts of the subdistrict as being within the jurisdiction of the sanitary district. But there was never a Tambon Council or a TAO for the remaining parts of the subdistrict, though the DOPA population statistics listed some small part of the population of the subdistrict as non-municipal. Hence it seems like this announcement makes the de-facto area now official.

It is also interesting how I became aware of these upgrades before they were published in the Royal Gazette. In past I found proposed upgrades in the meeting transcripts at law.moi.go.th, but those were not updated for several months now, and the site seems dead most of the time as well. Instead, it was the Thai Wikipedia potapt who updated the Wikidata item, which I then saw while checking the changes to the Wikidata items for the administrative entities for erroneous edits.