PAO elections forthcoming?

Shortly after the coup in 2014, all local elections were suspended and all the chairmen and councillors stayed in office way past their elected terms - most of them till today. Even though there was a national election in 2019, the local elections haven't been resumed yet. Just recently there were some news reports on a possible restart of these elections - though according to The Nation now budget problems form the latest reason for a delay ["PM says local elections 'might' be held this year", The Nation, June 15 2020].

Today another indication popped up that local elections are in the planning - probably starting with the Provincial Administrative Organizations. For 18 provinces the constituencies for a forthcoming election has been announced in the Royal Gazette, e.g. this announcement with the constituencies for Phuket province. These 18 provinces are mostly from the South, and some in the Central region. As I guess that if the local elections for the PAO will be done for the whole country, I expect there will be further announcements in the publishing queue - these 18 were already signed by the Election Commision in April.

Further local elections pending are for all the municipalities - these will also need constituencies defined first, as the current constituencies probably no longer fit with the population numbers. And of course there are many municipalities which were created or upgraded in the last 6 years. And also the TAO (subdistrict administrative organizations) need elections, though for these the constituencies are automatically defined by the boundaries of the administrative villages. And last not least Bangkok and Pattaya as special administrative units, as far as I know these two are the only which have a new governor/chairman assigned by the government.

Dissolved PAO councils

When I wrote about the 2004 elections for the Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAO) councils and chairmen, I mentioned that for Buriram the election did take place some months earlier, but couldn't explain that in detail. Now while trying to follow the PAO elections this year and compiling information on the previous elections, I could finally make more sense out of it.

The first elections for the Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAO) under the 1997 PAO act took place on February 5 2000 in all provinces - already except Buriram which had that election on September 7 1999. Another four year before, there were elections for PAO councils on December 24, though these were still PAO as defined by the Provincial Administration act. When the 1997 PAO act came into effect, these councils were converted into the new style PAO without a new election, so all of the council ended their term December 23 1999. All except Buriram, because that PAO council was the first one which was dissolved before its nominal end of term and then had early elections.

With a list of local governments ending their terms in 2008 I was able to reconstruct all the PAO election dates in 2004 - only Buriram and Kanchanaburi were missing in that table. Buriram had its election already on December 14 2003, but for Kanchanaburi I was able to find that there were elections on March 14 2004 and then again on February 2 2008, thus before the end of the four year term. It took me some time on Google to find an old news report explaining this odditiy - the council was dissolved on September 10 2007, but for whatever reason the election did not take place within the normal 60 days after the dissolution.

This year the PAO elections have been spread over the whole year thanks to the Election Commissions of some provinces taking long time to prepare new constituency definitions - if I am not mistaken Samut Prakan and Kanchanaburi even have no scheduled election date yet nor have their constituencies announced. This makes it much more complicate to follow than with one or two election dates, so I almost missed the third case of a dissolved council. The PAO of Surat Thani was elected on April 20 2008, and had its election this year on June 24, only slightly after the 45 days which would have been the deadline after a normal term end. However, it turned out that in fact the council was dissolved on December 16 2011, and it took six months to have the election due to the need of new constituencies boundaries - the council was enlarged from 30 to 36 seats because of the population in the province surpassing 100,000 since 2010.

I haven't yet read the PAO act to check what are the reasons why a council can be dissolved, but from what I found in the reports on the three cases mentioned above it seems that the dissolution was caused by the council not being able to agree on a budget.

PAO term ends

In last week's posting on the recent Provincial Administrative Organization elections, I mentioned that I lost the overview on which provinces will have their election at which date this year, and for which provinces the PAO chairman election is at a different date than the council election already. But while I was trying to compile all the data from those elections which just happened and place them into my XML files, I found a very interesting document on the website of the Election Commission in Chiang Rai.

Titled "Information on local administrations throughout the country which have end of term in 2012" (ข้อมูลองค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่นทั่วประเทศที่ครบวาระ ปี พ.ศ.2555), these two PDF contain a list of all the local administrations which have either (or both) their council or their mayor end the four year term and thus need to have elections within 45 days after the end of term. Sadly, it is a scanned document, thus one has to copy all data manually - the original Excel file would be so much more useful, as there are 3235 local elections this year. The largest number will be 1669 TAO which end their term in August, several of those will get upgraded to municipalities, but most will have elections in September then.

But since I am focusing on the PAO now, I now have a complete list of which province have their terms end this year. All the data I have collected into one spreadsheet - the dates of term end and the 45 day deadline in which the election has to take place, and also the dates elections took place as far as I know yet. I will of course update the document whenever I get new data. Several interesting things show up with the term end dates. In 2004 and 2008, there were just two election dates for the councils (and one separate for Buriram), as the the elections were synchronized in 2004 with the third amendment of the PAO act [Gazette]. Thus I would have expected that there will be just three dates for the end of term of the PAO councils - but while most have May 19th, there are also some with May 25th and May 26th, and several more dates from May, June and July. Either I remember wrong and there were more than the three dates in 2004 already, or there were some provinces where the term did not start with the election date as it would normally. It gets even more complicate for the chairmen - even though in most provinces these were still held at the same time as the council elections in 2008, there are several where the term of the chairman now ends some weeks or months after the council, Nong Bua Lamphu, Sakon Nakhon, Lamphun and Phitsanulok. I suspect that in these provinces the chairman elections had to be repeated after the original winner received a yellow or red card.

I have also added a column to show the number of days between the actual election date and the term end. If everything goes according to the standard procedures, this must be a number between 1 and 45. Ignoring the negative numbers for some of the chairman elections - these are due to resignations shortly before their term end like those in Phuket and Buriram - there is already a 66 day difference in Surat Thani, the election is scheduled for June 24th, but the deadline was June 3rd. Also strange is Tak, where the election took place one day before the end of term.

The reason for the delayed election are the constituency boundaries, which were not updated by the provincial Election Commission in time. On the website of the Phra PAO I found a note that a total of 27 provinces got their election delayed, though no list of provinces was mentioned in that. But obviously Phrae is one of those 27, as the election should have been on last Sunday as latest possible date, but on May 31st there were still three possible suggestions for the new constituency boundaries. I really wonder why there has been such a delay, as the Election Commission knew before the date by which the constituencies must be defined to ensure an election within the 45 day range, it is the negligence of this office which leave the provinces without a legitimate council longer than necessary.

In summary, not just the chairmen election deviate more and more from the original synchronized dates, the council elections also spread over the whole year already.

PAO elections last weekend

Last Sunday, in several provinces the councils and chairmen of the Provincial Administrative Organizations were elected. Sadly I lost the overview, as four years ago there were two dates at which the council elections were done, but I still have no list which of the provinces were at which of the two dates - only Buriram is a special case as it does its elections a few weeks earlier. And to add to the confusion, not all the provinces which had council elections this weekend necessarily also had an election of the chairman ((นายกองค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัด) - whenever a chairman did not stay in office till the end of the term due to an early resignation, a red or yellow card or even due to assassination, the newly elected chairman has a full four year term. So the number of provinces which has council and chairman elections on the same date is shrinking continuously.

The English press as usual did not cover these local elections much, more focusing on the newly elected transgender councilor in Nan than reporting the overall results, and also many of the provincial Election Commissions websites are not kept up-to-date, so it is difficult to compile a full overview again this time. At least, two other bloggers have covered these election as bit.

• Bangkokpundit focuses on the party affiliations of the chairmen and the council factions, especially if in the PAO elections the same party was chosen as in the last general election.
• BKK Mango has just started a blog, and the only two postings so far are the results of the PAO elections in Phichit and Roi Et. I hope there is more to come.

Latest PAO chairmen elections

Last Sunday, some more province had their elections for the provincial administrative organization (PAO). Sadly I have no real overview on which province will have its election on which date - four years ago there were two rounds, and Buriram was some more weeks earlier already. While the councils have ended their terms after four years and most likely the same provinces will vote together as four years ago, it is much more complicate for the PAO chairman. If any of these leave their office prematurely - because they resign to call for a snap election, they get red-carded for electoral fraud or die, a chairman election is called then and then the new chairman has a full four year term as well. Thus only in those provinces where both the council and the chairmen ended their terms in normal way since the PAO elections were synchronized in 2004, the two will be elected on the same date this year.

The English press only mentioned two chairmen elections from last Sunday - Nakhon Ratchasima getting its first female chairman, and the Democrat party winner of Kanchanaburi being accused of electoral fraud. In the Thai press I found only one additional one, in Suphanburi the incumbent Bunchu Chansuwan (บุญชู จันทร์สุวรรณ) has been the clear winner gaining 70% of the valid votes. On April 7, Phuket will vote for their PAO chairman, and for the most other provinces I have lost track of when the term of the chairman ends and thus have this election soon. As these elections are organized by the provincial election commission (EC), there is no single overview page giving all the dates at one look. And some of the websites of the provincial EC branches are very bad, no data or a long time since the last update. But at least for the three elections last Sunday I was able to find the full numbers, e.g. for Suphanburi at the EC and thus was able to add them into my province XML.

<official title="PAOChairman" name="บุญชู จันทร์สุวรรณ" begin="2012-03-18">
  <election date="2012-03-18">
    <candidates eligiblevoter="641014" invalidvotes="11285" abstainvotes="9096">
      <candidate id="1" name="สมศักดิ์ รักซ้อน" votes="94720"/>
      <candidate id="2" name="อิสระ บุญญาอรุณเนตร" votes="8291"/>
      <candidate id="3" name="บุญชู จันทร์สุวรรณ" votes="247833"/>
    </candidates>
  </election>
</official>

Phuket PAO chairmen early election

Last week, Paiboon Upattising (ไพบูลย์ อุปัติศฤงค์), chairman of the Phuket Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO, องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดภูเก็ต) sent a letter of resignation to the province governor. The interesting part is that actually his term in office would have ended in April this year anyway, and he announced that he will run for re-election, so in effect this will separate the chairman election from the PAO council election, as now a new chairman election has to be held within 60 days. The reasons he gave according to Phuket Gazette are

Mr Paiboon added that he preferred the OrBorJor elections to be held early because he foresees delays in holding the elections.
“There are problems with the constituency boundaries because of the imbalance in the increasing number of people in each voting district. The boundaries must be changed to redress this problem before the election can be held, and I have heard of no progress about this,” he said.

So far, no announcement on the PAO constituencies in any of the provinces has been published in the Royal Gazette, except for Buriram which has its election some months earlier than the others anyway. Since the constituencies are only necessary for the council, an election for the chairman can be held without any redefinition of constituencies.

Mr Paiboon cited problems in redrawing constituency boundaries as causing delays in holding elections in both the Rawai and Chalong municipalities.
“They have not had mayors for more than six months. This is causing a lot of problems, and all because of problems in redrawing the constituency boundaries.
“Many important decisions have not been made because the position of the mayor [in Rawai and Chalong] is empty. Election dates have not even been set.” he added.

At least for Chalong, just yesterday the constituencies were announced, with the announcement signed on February 8. Thus now at least for Chalong the municipal election can be finally be held.

It is a bit surprising that due to a slow drawing of constituencies elections can be postponed for many months. Whereas Chalong was just recently upgraded from being a TAO and if the Election Commission wasn't notified in time this could be an explanation for the delay, in case of Rawai there were municipal constituencies defined in 2007 already and it was beforehand known that the four year term will end in 2011 and the constituencies need to be checked at that time.

Anyway, now there will be two elections for the PAO in Phuket this year, and for sure the some expats and tourists especially in Patong will complain bitterly about the two sober weekends - to prevent the voters from going to the ballot intoxicated no alcohol will be on sale in shops and bars all weekend.

Buriram PAO constituencies

End of December, the constituencies for the PAO elections in Buriram were announced in the Royal Gazette - a welcome reminder that a new round of local elections will be held this year. Looking at the website of the Election Commission, I found that this local election is really imminent, as it well be held on January 15 already. For the PAO chairmen, four candidates are contesting including the incumbent Karuna Chitchop (นางกรุณา ชิดชอบ), wife of the de facto Bhum Jai Thai party leader Newin Chidchop [EC website]. Therefore this election will receive quite some media attention, especially as it is also the only PAO election at this time - in 2004 when all PAO held elections on March 14, Buriram started early on December 14 2003 as the term of its council ended shortly before the nation-wide election date. However, if I am not mistaken, then the previous election was on January 20 2008, thus Karuna resigned before her term ended, and therefore now the PAO chairman election will be held one month before the PAO council election. Anyway, this announcement will only be the first in a series of several more, at least Chiang Mai needs new constituencies due to the creation of the new district Galyani Vadhana. And also Nong Khai and Bueng Kan will need a new constituency list - strangely there was none posted yet despite there were by-elections already to fill up both councils after the split of the province. Comparing the constituencies for Buriram in this announcement and the previous one dating from 2003 shows not that many changes.

• Mueang Buriram district now has 6 constituencies instead of 5, with the subdistrict Nai Mueang now forming the constituency 1.
• Lam Plai Mat district was reduced from four to three constituencies.
• In the districts Nong Ki and Prakhon Chai, the constituencies changed their boundaries.

Since both in 2003 and 2011 the constituencies cover only full subdistricts, I was able to write down the constituencies into XML format, and include them into my code project. If possible (and time allows) I'll do the same for the forthcoming further announcements as well.

Bueng Kan PAO office location

Sign at the Bueng Kan PAO office
Photo by Tom Isaan

Some time ago, I mentioned that I found the address for the office of the provincial administrative organization (PAO) of the new province Bueng Kan, but due to the nature of Thai addresses it is impossible to convert this into coordinates to point it on a map.

Now my reader Tom, who is traveling a lot within the Northeast of Thailand (Isaan), was in Bueng Kan and managed to find the office at plot 198, Mu 8 of Bueng Kan subdistrict.



View Bueng Kan administration in a larger map
In the above map, it is the easternmost marker, located close to the land office of Bueng Kan. As the building is already visible in the satellite imagery from 2003 and looks like the standard style of government offices from above, it would be interesting to know how the building was used before. As you see, I have already added the location to my Bueng Kan administration map, but also to Wikimapia and of course into my XML.

Now in the vicinity of the small town of Bueng Kan, the only office locations I still don't have are the TAO Bueng Kan and probably a bit further away the Wisit subdistrict municipality. But as Tom has already sent me other geotagged photos of administrative offices, I am sure whenever he spots either of these I will get them soon as well. And this is one way how every of my readers can help me - in case you can find the location of a TAO or municipality office just send me, and I will add them to my maps.

Bueng Kan PAO logo competition

It seems like the PAO Bueng Kan (องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดบึงกาฬ) does not want to wait until the official seal of the province is finalized, and unlike most other provinces goes for a seal with an artwork differing from that of the corresponding provincial seal. I have stumbled on a news posting on the website of the Bueng Kan Provincial Office of Non-Formal and Informal Education titled ประชาสัมพันธ์ประกวดตราเครื่องหมายขององค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดบึงกาฬ (Announce of contest [to design] emblem of PAO Bueng Kan).

However before you rush to check out the PDF which contains the rules of the contest and start drawing sketches - I discovered this news so late that today is already the deadline to submit the proposals, so unless they got no worthy designs the logo will be known soon. The winning design will be awarded 10,000 baht (360 US$), though I have no idea of the normal prices of logo designers in Thailand.

The logo is supposed to be either round or an ellipse with a maximum diameter of 5 centimeter, the name "Bueng Kan PAO" in the border, and for the motive inside has to choose items which have a connection to the province.

Another information gained from the PDF - the Bueng Kan PAO has its (temporary) office at plot 198 in Mu 8 of Bueng Kan subdistrict, thus not in the district office like the preliminary province administration. However, I have no idea where this office location is on Google Earth, as there's no easy way to translate a Thai address into coordinates.

PAO elections in Nong Khai and Bueng Kan

This Sunday, the Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO) for the new province Bueng Kan will get elected, another step to make the new province completely operational.

The chairman of the PAO has to be elected, as well as the council of the PAO. When reading the article in Manager, to my surprise I noticed that it won't be elected from scratch, but those councilmen in the Nong Khai PAO council sent from the districts which now form Bueng Kan are already set, thus it is more a by-election to fill the vacant spaces, so the council again reaches its nominal size of 30 councilors. Therefore, the term of the council will end at the same day as it would have ended without the province creation. Correspondingly, in Nong Khai there will be also by-elections to fill the vacant spaces, these are to be held on July 16. As the Nong Khai PAO had 17 seats from the districts which now form Bueng Kan province, there are 13 seats which need to be elected now. In detail, these are

• Mueng Bueng Kan - 4 seats
  
• Ta Bo, Fao Rai - 2 seats
  
• Phon Phisai - 3 seats
  
• Si Chiang Mai, Rattanawapi - 1 seat
  
• Pho Tak, Sa Khro, Sang Khon - no council election
  

The interesting thing would be the constituencies. For the PAO council, there are single-seated constituencies, thus those districts which now have to send more than one councilor needs to be divided into constituencies. But at the end of the term, there need to be different constituencies, as the number of seats per district will be different then. And an even more confusing situation could arise if one of the 17 councilors resigns or dies, then which constituencies are to be used for the by-election? The original one as used when that councilor was elected to the Nong Khai PAO? It would have been easier if the PAO council were to be elected from scratch, however that was apparently not possible as the PAO law states that the term of a councilor is four years.

Samut Prakan PAO Chairman elections

Last Sunday, the citizen of Samut Prakan province were called to elect a new chairman of the Provincial Administrative Organization, as the term for the previous chairman Amnuai Ratnithat (อำนวย รัศมิทัต) had resigned from his post, not too long before his term ended. He was elected in August 2007, so a chairman election was to be held end of this year anyway. Also this previous election was done prematurely, as in June 2007 his predecessor Somphon Asavahame (สมพร อัศวเหม) died before ending his term.

A total of five candidates were running, hopefully correctly transcribed:

1. Chonsawat Asavahame (ชนม์สวัสดิ์ อัศวเหม), son of former deputy interior minister Watthana Asavahame. Don't know how he is related with the former PAO chairman Somphon. Chonsawat was mayor of Samut Prakan city twice.
   
2. Amnuai Rassamithat (อำนวย รัศมิทัต), according to the news article I used for this list he was PAO chairman before, but must have been before 2006. The PAO website sadly has no list of their former chairmen.
   
3. Tanaphon Kharomprat (ธนภณ คารมปราชย์) of the New Politics Party.
   
4. Phattarawat Apidennaphasay (ภัทรวดี อภิเด่นนภาลัย), affiliated with the UDD (red shirts). The only female candidate.
   
5. Thonphat Thanthonpat (ธนภัท ธัญธนพัต), a local candidate
   

Richard Barrow, the most prolific English language blogger and tweeter in Thailand, has been life covering the vote counting on Twitter with many tweeted photos, but not until the counting was finished at 10 am on Monday. Several of the photos on the vote counting are collected in his blog. As reported by ThaiToday, the winner is candidate one, Chonsawat Asavahame, with 157,577 votes. Second has been candidate two with 148,717 votes. The third and last one with any significant number of votes has been candidate four with 114,218. Candidate three won just 4,138 votes, and number five only 2,186. A total of 848,111 citizen were called to votes, so the turnout was 54%. 28,060 chose the No vote on their ballot, another 11,208 were invalid. The result is now pending approval by the Election Commission, so if no complaints is raised it will become official in about one month.

Day of the local administration

The Thai cabinet, the council of the ministers, is a major place where policies are decided or laws are prepared to send into the parliament. In order to make sure I won't miss any development in the case of the planned province Bueng Kan, I started to monitor the actual cabinet agendas - the English language press usually only covers a subset of the points, even the news outlet of the Public Relations Department only covers part.

So I found this obscure government website collecting the complete cabinet agenda lists since 2000, and thanks to the update scanner plugin I get easily notified on any new agenda list posted there. The ones I guess are the ones most relevant to this blog topic are those by the Interior Ministry, found by the abbreviation "มท." in the second column.

Though there was nothing exciting which went through unnoticed by the English press, one item discussed in the cabinet meeting on June 22 was interesting anyway. Item 49 on that list reads

การขออนุมัติกำหนดให้วันที่ ๑๘ มีนาคม ของทุกปีเป็น วันท้องถิ่นไทย
Ask for permission to make March 18 of every year the Day of Thai Local (Administration)

The name of this new commemorative day วันท้องถิ่นไทย (Wan Thong Thin Thai) includes the word ท้องถิ่น meaning local, also found in the Thai name for the Bangkok district museums (พิพิธภัณฑ์ท้องถิ่นกรุงเทพมหานคร) or the name of the Department of Local Administration (DOLA, กรมส่งเสริมการปกครองท้องถิ่น).

Whereas the cabinet meeting agenda only gives a very short summary on the rationale behind this proposal, an article at the Thai online news site ryt9.com gives the whole story behind it. Thus the reason for choosing March 18 is that on this day in 1906 the very first rural sanitary district (sukhaphiban, สุขาภิบาล) Tha Chalom (ท่าฉลอม) was created, which in turn developed into the city Samut Sakhon. Though this act by king Chulalongkorn was the start of the local administration in Thailand, it only really started when decentralization came into focus in the 1990s.

The proposal was created by the Department of Local Administration in cooperation with the Provincial Administrative Organizations Council, the National Municipal League and the Subdistrict Administrative Organizations League, and submitted to the cabinet on March 2 2010.

March 18 has been a local commemorative day in Samut Sakhon city already, this year in fact the celebrations took place March 17 to 19, and included worship ceremonies, a beauty contents, parade and concerts as well as a exhibition honoring King Chulalongkorn. So lets see if next year on this date will have ceremonies all over the country at the local administrative offices.

Constituencies for the local government councils

The councils of the local government units each have quite different ways of being elected, different numbers of councilors and constituencies. I will only list the current system this time, though I already learned that for the PAO the current system was just adopted in 2003.

The Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO) have a council, in which every Muban covered by the TAO sends two councilmen. Therefore the constituencies are identical with the Muban, and the number of councilors varies widely. The exception are TAO which have only one or two Muban - in these cases there will be 6 councilors, and each Muban has 3 (or 6) representatives.

For the municipalities (thesaban), the number of councilors depends on the municipal level. Subdistrict municipalities (thesaban tambon) as the lowest level have 12 councilors, elected in two constituencies with 6 representatives each. For towns (thesaban mueang), there are three constituencies with 6 councilors each, and for cities (thesaban nakhon) four constituencies. Since 2003, the boundaries of the constituencies are published in the Royal Gazette, see for example the one on the four constituencies of the city Surat Thani from 2007, issued at the upgrade of that municipality.

The councils of the Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAO) differ in size depending on the size of the province. However, unlike the other local government units, in this case each constituency elects one councilor. At least in all cases I checked so far, every district (Amphoe) has at least one constituency. For example, Surat Thani province has 30 constituencies, of which 13 cover a whole district, 3 districts have two constituencies, two district have three constituencies and finally the Mueang district has five.

The special administrative area of Pattaya, an municipality outside the thesaban system, has a council of 24 members with four constituencies, same as a city municipality. The other special administrative area is Bangkok, where both a council for the whole city as well as a council in each of the districts is elected. I'll cover these in more detail later, as we will see he local elections in Bangkok later this year.

Sawai Boonma on local administrations

Last week, in the opinion section of Bangkok Post was an article by economist Sawai Boonma titled On the fast track to becoming a failed state. A quite pessimistic of the current political situation in Thailand, the part on the local administration is worth repeating.

Most provinces, municipalities and local administrative districts are now largely controlled by politico-business oligarchies. Each oligarch uses a system of patronage to maintain its base.
Sometimes they fight but they also collude, especially at the national level. [..]
As a result, Thailand is now practically divided into fiefdoms controlled by shady people with money.

Province administration outside central town

Normally, the province hall (Sala Klang, ศาลากลางจังหวัด) is located right in the middle of the town with the same name. Often, there's even a full government center, including other offices like the Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO) and the provincial court (San Changwat, ศาลจังหวัด), sometimes even the district office of the Mueang district and the municipality, for example the one in Nonthaburi I have documented here already. But like every rule, there are the exceptions, when the original province hall became too small and not enough space was available to build the replacement in town anymore.

The first one I noticed was Kamphaeng Phet. Originally, the province hall was located close to the entrance of the historical park. Now, the old building is used by the district office instead, and the new province hall is located about 7 kilometer north of it in Nong Pling subdistrict, still in the Mueang district but outside the municipality. Judging from the satellite picture, the provincial court has moved to the new location as well, whereas the PAO is still at the old location, though I don't know which building it is exactly.

In Lampang, the old province hall area seems to be deserted completely, at least none of the office I know about is located in there now. The province hall is in Phra Bat subdistrict, 6 kilometer southeast of the old location. The PAO is even further away, in Sala subdistrict of Ko Khae district. The provincial court is located next to the province hall, while next to the old province hall the district court is found. The district office finally is still in a rather small building near the old administration center. For this case I have made a small map, as there are quite a lot of buildings concerned.

View Lampang government offices in a larger map

The final case I am aware of is the PAO of Phisanulok, which is at the road Phitsanulok to Nakhon Thai in Samo Khae subdistrict. However I wasn't able to find the building in the satellite image yet, so it may have moved just recently and so the building might just be too recent.

Nakhon Phanom Provincial Administrative Organization

One local administration using the internet, and especially the Google tools, to a great extend is the provincial administrative organization (PAO) of Nakhon Phanom (องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัดนครพนม).

The chairman of the PAO (นายก อบจ.) Somchop Nitipoj (สมชอบ นิติพจน์) has his own blog, as well as his deputy (รองนายก อบจ.) Arom Wiangkan (อารมณ์ เวียงด้าน), who blogs for more than a year already. Even more, the schedule of the chairman can be viewed as a public Google calendar, and lots of photos from events organized by the PAO are in various Picasa albums. It also has a Powerpoint presentation with the biography of Somchop.

Though I can get only very few of what is written in these sources due to my limited Thai, I wish other government entities would have a similar open way to communicate with their population.

Corruption at the local government

Found in yesterday's Bangkok Post "Local officials top graft list"

Local administrative organisations top the list of state agencies embezzling public funds allocated for procurement and development schemes, a government report says.
The report, by the Office of the Permanent Secretary under the PM's Office, looked into alleged irregularities in the use of state budgets for the 2009 fiscal year, which ended Sept 30.
[...]
The office was able to conclude its investigations into 67 cases and retrieve 17 million baht. Thirty-three staff were dismissed and 30 had their salaries cut. About 40 cases have gone to the public prosecutors and the courts.

This fits with the survey published by the US-based NGO Asia Foundation in September on the opinions of Thai people to many questions regarding the constitution, the state of democracy and quality of administration. The full report is published as a 117 page PDF which can be freely downloaded. Question 12.5 targets the corruptions in local administration, which however includes both the local government as well as the local officials of the central government.

Some people say that it is often necessary to pay bribes to civil servants if you need something from the government, such as papers, permits, or documents. Others say that this is not true and that the civil servants are
honest. Which view is closer to your own? (Q77)

48% of the answers said yes, bribery is necessary, another 48% said no, and 3% had no opinion. And when asked about personal experience with bribery in the past 5 years, 26% confirmed that they at least personally know someone who had to pay bribes. The authors of the study aren't sure whether the fact that only have of those thinking that bribery is wide-spread actually have direct knowledge is due to a lower than perceived number of corrupt officials or simply due to the fact that many did not have to contact authorities recently.

PAO elections in 2004

While reading the book Thaksin : the business of politics in Thailand on the political system of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, one short section fits into the topic of this blog. It is on the spread of party politics into the local elections. In the past, the political parties in Thailand were only active in the national elections, while in the local elections for the municipal or provincial councils it had only local groups without any official party label or affiliation.

In 2003, local teams started to use the TRT (Thai Rak Thai) party label, though the party had the policy of not running in local elections. This policy was lifted by party leader Thaksin in December 2003, so the PAO elections in early 2004 were the first to have widespread use of party labels. Also, the interest in these elections grew a lot, since the budget and tasks of the PAO was increased a lot - for example local road construction and other infrastructure development was transferred to the authority of the PAOs.

Though the party label was used in these elections, in several provinces it had more than one group using the label of the same party, the major parties did not hav a team in every province, and teams without party affiliation were also running. The results were

• Thai Rak Thai: 47 provinces
• Democratic Party: 13 provinces
• Chat Thai: 5 provinces
• Chat Phatthana: 2 provinces
• Independent: 7 provinces
  

Strangely, this sums up to 74 provinces, but there are 75 PAO as Bangkok does not have one. The book also displays a map which I have redrawn, but this is also fauly - Bangkok is drawn as a TRT province despite having no PAO, and the province of Samut Songkhram is missing in the map completely. As I don't have the source data used to create that map I simply left Samut Songkhram empty same as Bangkok. For the 2008 PAO elections I don't know any results by party, except that unsurprisingly Surat Thani remained a Democratic Party stronghold.

Phuket PAO president cleared of vote-buying allegations

Phuket Gazette reported yesterday that Paiboon Upatising (ไพบูลย์ อุปัติศฤงค์), president of the Phuket provincial administrative organization (PAO) has been cleared of the vote-buying allegations which led to a yellow card issued by the Election Committee (EC) in March.

The decision by the Region 8 appeals court took a bit longer than in the case of Surat Thani PAO president Thani Thaugsuban, who received the yellow card in February. In Surat Thani, a new PAO president was elected already, and Thani stumbled upwards to replace his brother as Member of Parliament in the by-election on August 30.

On the website of the Phuket PAO, one can still read the statement of Paiboon written in March. I guess a new one will be posted there soon. By the way, this website is about the best one from any of the administrative entities I have come across so far - not overloaded with stuff and completely bilingual. I only miss the list of the past PAO presidents in the history section, and a RSS feed to easily follow the news on that site.

Decentralization problems

Today I noticed an article from The Nation of last week titled 'Irreconcilable' powers holding on a seminar held in Bangkok on August 26. While it has no details on this seminar, the article gives some interesting quotes from participants on the state of decentralization in Thailand.

Overall, the comments collected in the article are quite negative, all having failures in the decentralization of the late 1990s which led to the creation of the Tambon administrative organizations (TAO) and increased powers to the Provincial Administrative organizations (PAO).

According to Nakharin Mektrairat (นครินทร์ เมฆไตรรัตน์)

The existing system had been established on "an old school of thought", which does not correspond with the rapid expansion and development of today's urban communities, he said.

Searching for some more information on Nakharin, I found one of his papers in English in a Japanese symposium transcript. I have only scanned the document so far and have to read in in detail. It's a pity he did not publish much in English.

Another interesting quote is from Prakaipharb Chaum (ประกายภาพ ชะอุ่ม) from the Saen Suk municipality (เทศบาลเมืองแสนสุข) in Chonburi.

[...] said local bodies were linked to national politics through the longstanding patronage system. "Budgets have been allocated to local levels by national politicians through favouritism."