Tambon Councils

One administrative unit I very much neglected so far are the Tambon Councils (สภาตำบล), both because they were just a council consisting only of ex-officio or appointed members with a very limited power, but also because the only Royal Gazette announcements I found on them so far were the conversions into the subdistrict administrative organizations in the 1990s - the last Tambon Council ceased to exist in 2004.

Just recently a newly created page on a municipality in the Thai Wikipedia also included a reference to the initial creation of the local government unit as a Tambon Council, and by that I could now finally add the Royal Gazette announcements establishing these units.

• Revolutionary Act 326 issued December 13 1973 gave the legal definition of the Tambon Councils, and if I understand the text right also abolished all the previously existing subdistrict administrative organizations. Not sure yet whether these were also directly converted into Tambon Councils then.
• Creation of Tambon Councils 1973 [Gazette], containing a list of about 2000 councils created
• Creation of Tambon Councils 1974 [Gazette], containing a list of 931 councils created
• Creation of Tambon Councils 1975 [Gazette], creating the councils for all remaining subdistricts which are not completely within other local government units. Apparently all the subdistricts created after 1975 then got their council together automatically when they were set up.

I started to work through those two announcements with lists, and only did the province Surat Thani so far, but already there were two strange things showing up. The Tambon Council for Thung subdistrict in Chaiya was listed in both the 1973 and 1974 announcement, and I haven't seen any correction announcement to either of the two. The history page at the website of the TAO Thung, though very long, doesn't mention the administrative history, so it offers no help on which date is the correct one. The second one is a strange case which I already stumbled upon when working through the list of Tambon Council upgrades to subdistrict administrative organizations. In 1995 the Tambon Council for Bang Kung was upgraded to a TAO, and now I also found that this council was created in 1974. The strange thing - the whole area of Bang Kung belongs to Surat Thani municipality, and already did in 1974, so there shouldn't be any second local government there. Also, the TAO is never mentioned anymore, neither listed in any of the current lists, nor was it ever officially abolished. Also Google searches for สภาตำบลบางกุ้ง or องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบางกุ้ง only give results for the same-named units in Trang and Suphanburi province, thus no indication what happened in Surat Thani- it looks like a mistake which was not noticed for many years then quietly deleted from any lists. The oldest list I found is from 2007 - mirrored by the Wayback Machine from the old DOPA website - already omits it.

Interpellation on a Tambon Council upgrade

The latest interpellation regarding the administrative subdivisions published in the Royal Gazette yesterday is somewhat odd. In this interpellation, which was submitted on November 13 last year, the member of parliament Niyom Vorapanya (นิยม วรปัญญา) from Lopburi constituency 2 asks for the Tambon Council (Sapha Tambon, สภาตําบล) Lam Sonthi to be upgraded to a subdistrict municipality. The strange part is that apparently Niyom is not really familiar with what he has asked - because the Tambon Council Lam Sonthi has been upgraded to a Subdistrict Administrative Organization in 1996 already [Gazette], the last of the Tambon Councils were gone by 2001. Thus not surprisingly, the answer from the Ministry of Interior is rather short

ปัจจุบันประเทศไทยไม่มีสภาตําบลเหลืออยู่ ดังนั้น การยกฐานะจากสภาตําบล
เป็นเทศบาลตําบลจึงไม่สามารถกระทําได้
Right now Thailand has no Tambon Councils remaining. Therefore an upgrade of a Tambon Council to a subdistrict municipality cannot be done.

What Niyom might have meant was to upgrade the TAO Lam Sonthi (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลลำสนธิ), and actually this was already approved in board meeting 26/2009, but was one of the many upgrades which were delayed for four years due to budgetary reasons.

TAO councils of the 1960s

Chapter 3 of the 1987 book "Government and Politics of Thailand" on the bureaucracy gives an outline of the administrative structure as of 1980. Oddly it includes the TAO, which as far as I know were abolished after the 1972 coup - I suspect this is because this text is sourced on the 1973 Ph.D. dissertation by Tawat Wichaidit "Provincial Administration in Thailand", and the author of this chapter, Chai-Anan Samudavanija, was not aware that the administrative system had already changed quite a bit in the decade since the publication of his source. But this has the advantage that I could finally find some information on these first incarnation of the Tambon Administrative Organizations, as that 1973 dissertation wasn't published and thus is quite difficult to get into my library.

The relevant paragraph on the TAO reads as follows:

The tambon administrative organization has as its legislative body a council composed of the kamnan and all village headmen, plus one elected member from each village. These councils receive appropriations from the Department of Local Administration through the budget of the provincial council, and from the Department of Community Development (CD) through the Provincial CD Officer. Since its inception in 1956, the tambon administrative organizations has remained lightly financed and heavily dependent upon grants-in-aid from the central government; the typical tambon council received a grant of only 10,000 baht (US$500) a year.

Compare these with the current TAO council, which also has two representatives from each village, but the central administrative officers - subdistrict and village headmen - are no longer part of this council. When the TAO were created again since 1994, only in the first term of the councils the headmen were members of the council, but after this grace period the council has become completely elected.

Oddly, the above described TAO council in the 1960s is identical with the Tambon Councils as defined by the TAO and Tambon council act of 1994\, only that in 2001 the last of the Tambon councils were upgraded to TAO. If I am not mistaken, before 1994 these councils also included the subdistrict doctor, another official on the payroll of the Ministry of Interior. Guess I still have to research these two councils and their development a bit more to get the full picture.

List of Tambon Councils 1999-2001

On the website of the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) I finally found lists of all the Tambon Councils (สภาตำบล). As the subpages are not indexed by google, so it was more or less fluke I played with the image map of the index page and discovered the interesting stuff below.

The Tambon Councils (TC) are also a local administrative entity, however even lower than the subdistrict administration organizations (TAO), without any elected council and not a legal person. All the current TAOs were in fact created by upgrading the Tambon Councils. A few remained after the big wave of TAO creations 1996-1999, in fact those lists contain 214 entries for 2001 and 219 for 2000 and 1999. I already found announcements in the Royal Gazette by which a lot of TCs were merged into either municipalities or TAO in 2003 and 2004, but never knew if any TCs survived till today.

Thus by checking these lists of TCs with those announcements I had processed before, I could eliminate all but a just about 5 of them. It turned out that some I simply overlooked when translating the announcement into XML as I did not notice it were two TC simultaneously merged into one TAO or municipality. Another two I found in announcements I did not look at before as the title was different from the standard ones. It only leaves a single TC I cannot find anything about - Lamphu (สภาตำบลลำภู). But it seems that one was a quite peculiar one, because in the tables it has the comment "ไม่มีประชากร" (does not have population), not surprisingly as the whole subdistrict is part of the town Nong Bua Lamphu anyway. But the tables are not fully correct either, a few TC are mentioned in the 2004 announcements but not listed in the tables.

But in summary: The last Tambon Councils were abolished in 2004, since then it only has TAO and municipalities.