Thursday, March 26, 2020

Bueng Kan town to be created

When the new province of Bueng Kan was created in 2011, there was one thing which was strikingly different to the previous batch of province creation - the capital of the province wasn't made a town (Thesaban Mueang). When the TIS1099 geocodes were assigned to the districts as well as the municipalities, the usual 99 for the provincial capital was left out, Bueng Kan subdistrict municipality was assigned the code 3898 instead.

At that time the actual location of the provincial administrative offices wasn't decided yet, but by now its construction is long completed in the southern part of Bueng Kan subdistrict, in area administrated by the Bueng Kan subdistrict administrative organization. Apparently now the time has come to create the first town in Bueng Kan province.

In the 5th meeting of the 1st board to consider draft laws on February 19 2020, a municipal change in Bueng Kan was discussed [transcript]  . But since I cannot access that website for 5 years already, only thanks to the Google cache I can read the meeting agenda, which includes "รวมองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบึงกาฬ เทศบาลตำบลวิศิษฐ์ และเทศบาลตำบลบึงกาฬ อำเภอบึงกาฬ จังหวัดบึงกาฬ และเปลี่ยนแปลงเขตและฐานะเป็นเทศบาลเมืองบึงกาฬ" which means that three local governments are to be merged into the new Bueng Kan town.

Bueng Kan subdistrict municipality covers parts of both Wisit and Bueng Kan subdistrict, and the other two local governments the remaining areas, thus the new Bueng Kan town will fully cover two subdistricts. It was only in 1988 that Bueng Kan subdistrict was split into these two subdistricts [Gazette], until then the main settlement was right in the center of the subdistrict.


Though I just learned about this pending change few weeks before it will become effective by publication in the Royal Gazette, it was in the making for much longer time already. In June 2019, the people in the three affected local governments could vote on whether they approve it.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Numbers of local government units 2019

A reader notified me that the Department of Local Administration (DLA) also updated their statistics page with December 20th as its reference date. What was confusing is that the numbers of local government units as of December 31st from DOPA differed from those in the provincial breakdown - but once looking into the XLS file itself it showed that it was only this one HTML page not updated.

The interesting things about this update however are more subtile.

  • It was the third time DLA updated that page in 2019 - in June, September and now December. Normally it was only updated once a year with the end of the fiscal year in September.
  • The XLS file listing all municipalities and TAO now has a new sheet which lists the TAO with less than 2,000 citizens. I suspect this means that these 30 TAO are about to get merged into neighboring units.
I also used the opportunity to update the municipality sheet in my Thai province XLS, and to my shame even noticed that I had four municipalities created in 2013 missing in that.

BTW: The numbers of the local goverments will change this year for sure, the first status change was already announced in the Royal Gazette (Ban Krot in Ayutthaya [Gazette]), and some more can be found in the board meeting transcripts from law.moi.go.th which I can hardly access at all.

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Number of administrative units 2019

The Department of Provincial Administration has published the latest statistics of the numbers of administrative units in Thailand, as of December 31st 2019. The numbers are as follows, with the 2018 numbers in brackets if there were changes.
  • Changwat: 76
  • Amphoe: 878
  • Tambon: 7255
  • Muban: 75086 (75032)
  • PAO: 76
  • Thesaban: 2450 (2442)
    • Thesaban Nakhon: 30
    • Thesaban Mueang: 184 (179)
    • Thesaban Tambon: 2236 (2233)
  • TAO: 5324 (5332)
  • Special administrative units: 2
After some years of almost no changes, now there are some new administrative villages, and also the number municipality upgrades have increased - and several more are in the pipeline, as I have noticed them in the meeting transcripts at law.moi.go.th. And as usual, there is still the odd discrepancy of one subdistrict which is not counted in this statistics, but still included in the population data.