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.