New Muban, new municipality

I have neglected the blog for the past half year - kept myself busy with some other projects on Wikidata, but also not much happened with the subdivisions lately as politics was apparently preoccupied with the general election and coronation. Another reason which made it more difficult to keep up with the news is the fact that my automatic search within the Royal Gazette for interesting new announcements strangely fails most of the time, so i fact I did miss one change to report. And as before, the municipal changes from law.moi.go.th are still hardly accessible, the strange routing problem persists for several years already.

The following municipal changes were in discussion, and are now probably awaiting to be officially announced in the Royal Gazette.

• Ban Klang TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบ้านกลาง), San Pa Tong district, Chiang Mai province, to be renamed to Wiang Tha Kham (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลเวียงท่ากาน). [Meeting 24/2562]
• Kut Wa TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลกุดหว้า), Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, to be renamed to Na Khrai TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลนาไคร้) [Meeting 27/2562]
• Bua Khao town (เทศบาลเมืองบัวขาว), Kuchinarai district, Kalasin province, to be renamed to Kuchinarai town (เทศบาลเมืองกุฉินารายณ์) [Meeting 27/2562]
• Sam Khwai Phueak TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลสามควายเผือก), Mueang Nakhon Pathom district, Nakhon Pathom province, to be upgraded to a town (เทศบาลเมืองสามควายเผือก) [Meeting 27/2562]
• Rua Yai TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลรั้วใหญ่), Mueang Suphanburi district, Suphanburi province, to be upgraded to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลรั้วใหญ่) [Meeting 29/2562]
• Khae Rai TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลแคราย), Krathum Baen district, Samut Sakhon province, to be upgraded to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลแคราย) [Meeting 29/2562]

Additionally, the creation of one new administrative village (Muban) was announced - Mu 20 of Chiang Yuen subdistrict, Mueang Udon Thani district, Udon Thani province was created by splitting of area from Mu 1. The new village also got the same name as Mu 1 - Ban Chiang Yuen (บ้านเชียงยืน) [Gazette]. In a second announcement, the boundaries of Mu 1 and 14 were also adjusted [Gazette]. What is a bit odd at this new village is the fact that Mu 21 was already created in 2016, but the number 20 was not used at that time. I can only suspect that this new village was already planned at that time, but it took another 3 years to settle the boundary details and make the new village official.

Wang Nuea TAO to be merged with Wang Nuea municipality

There hasn't been any changes to the local governments since the upgrade of Pa Sak almost exactly two years ago, maybe due to the proposed abolish of the TAO level. However, in the meeting number 44 of the board two to consider draft laws on September 9, the merge of Wang Nuea TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลวังเหนือ) with Wang Nuea subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลวังเหนือ) was discussed. As I still cannot access moi.go.th, I can only read indirectly through the Google cache, yet what I can find in the transcript of the meeting suggests the change is forthcoming very soon - maybe directly with end of the term of the TAO council on October 19th. Waiting for the end of the council term is somewhat strange, given that the local elections are suspended since the coup in 2014 already, but it was similar with the upgrade of Pa Sak mentioned before.

The transcript states, that due to the low population in the TAO - 1949 according to the transcript, 2167 in the latest DOPA statistics - the TAO should be abolished. A poll on whether the citizen approve this dissolution has been done, asking with which local government Wang Nuea shall be merged.

• Wang Nuea municipality: 679 votes
• Ban Mai municipality: 217 votes
• Wang Sai TAO: 25 votes
• Thung Hua TAO: 5 votes
• Wang Tai TAO: 5 votes

The voters chose the obvious solution, to let the Wang Nuea municipality cover almost whole subdistrict Wang Nuea (Ban Mai covers a small part of the sub district as well).

NCPO Announcement 29/2016

Today, the 29th announcement of the National Council for Peace and Order of this year (คำสั่งหัวหน้าคณะรักษาความสงบแห่งชาติ ที่ ๒๙/๒๕๕๙) was announced in the Royal Gazette, which by its publication became active law. This announcement deals with the local government administrators and councilors in case of a change in the municipal status. So far, whenever a municipality or a subdistrict administrative organization changes its administrative status, the mayor and the council have to vacate their office and stand for a new election. Especially for the council this is logical, as with the change of status the size of the council changes, thus the previously elected council doesn't fit anymore. Thus, so far usually all the municipal upgrades were done whenever the terms of either the council and/or the mayor ends, and a new election was pending anyway. However, in some cases the time till the next election was quite long, as the Election Commission first has to come up with a new constituency outline matching the new size of the council.

However, since the coup in 2014 there were no elections for the local governments anymore, by announcements 85 and 86 all of the local elections were halted and those mayors and councilors in office were given an indefinite extension of their term by announcement 1/2015. As even for a nation election the schedule is still unsure and depends on the constitutional referendum, those less important local elections certainly have to wait even longer.

I am not sure if this announcement somehow relates with an announcement by the Department of Local Administration from last week titled "แนวทางการแก้ไขปัญหาและผลกระทบจากการปรับโครงสร้างเทศบาล" (way to solve municipal restructure) - which if I understand it correctly suggests that TAO with more than 20 million Baht income should be upgraded to municipalities.

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.

Local government units covering more than one subdistrict

About half a year ago, a discussion on the best outline of the Amphoe articles on the German Wikipedia raised the question how many of the subdistrict administrative organizations (SAO/TAO) don't cover the same area as the corresponding subdistrict. I couldn't answer back then, I only knew that the about 900 subdistrict municipalities created in 1999 usually cover only parts of a subdistrict, so the TAO covers the remaining parts; and I knew that especially in Ayutthaya province, several adjoining subdistricts are merged together to one single TAO. However, I could not give the actual numbers for each category of TAO.

In order to be able to give these numbers, I started to add a new XML tag to my data files, but only did this for a few provinces at first. Luckily, my fellow Wikipedian hdamm came to help and also added these tags to many of the XML files, so right now the central and southern provinces are completely tagged, as well as most of the northern provinces and some of those in the northeast. Though there are still 1285 local government missing, I think it is worth to give a partial answer now - at least to show that this blog isn't dead, I just was too busy with other tasks and thus haven't found the time to writeup good postings here.

Right now, there are 7852 local governments, of which the 76 provincial administrative organization and Bangkok are special cases which are out of this statistics. Those considered are

• 30 cities (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร)
• 175 towns (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง)
• 2235 subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล)
• 5334 subdistrict administrative organizations (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล)
• 1 special administrative area (i.e. Pattaya)

For 1285 of these 7775 the data isn't entered yet, but those which have a coverage defined fall into the following three categories.

• 4497 (69%) cover exactly one subdistrict
• 1509 (23%) cover one subdistrict partially
• 485 (7%) cover more than one subdistrict at least in part (118 of these are TAO)
• 125 (2%) cover more than one subdistrict, and all of them completely (71 of these are TAO)

I'll post an update of this statistics once I have it for all of the local governments.

Old municipal upgrades announced

On Monday, a set of 25 announcements were published in the Royal Gazette, 24 of them giving the official confirmation of the upgrade of subdistrict administrative organizations to subdistrict municipalities, and one [Gazette] was about the upgrade of Ko Samui municipality to the highest municipal state (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร). The interesting part - all of these upgrades already happened in 2011 and 2012, so it took one to two years to make them into announcements in the Royal Gazette. The announcements itself were all signed before the date they became effective, so the first page of each of the PDF files cannot be the reason why the publication took so long. But since they all include the description of the municipal borders as well as a map, it must the preparation of this appendix which delayed the announcement - and which made several 100 further still announcements still pending to be published. In case you want to have details on all those announcements, best look at the XML file - I guess listing them all here would be too much detail.

As an example I have added the map from the upgrade of Ban Krang TAO (เทศบาลตำบลบ้านกร่าง), Si Prachan district in Suphanburi, because in this case the boundaries are more interesting than for most of the other ones which covers a complete Tambon. The subdistrict municipality Si Prachan (เทศบาลตำบลศรีประจันต์) covers the small town around the district office, and though the district office is located on the other side of the Tha Chin river in Si Prachan subdistrict, most of the municipality is located within Ban Krang subdistrict. Thus Ban Krang municipality only covers the remaining parts of the subdistrict, and to make it even more confusing, the municipality has two parts not connected with each other. In some cases, the boundaries between TAO and municipality were changed to avoid splitting the area in two disconnected parts, but I have no idea if the small part south of Si Prachan municipality will be transferred to it someday. The main information I can find with these maps is the location of the municipal office, and since this area already had been visited by the Streetview car I can embed the view of the office building below. As the car passed there in August 2012, the same month the upgrade became effective, the big sign still shows Ban Krang TAO - by now it must have been updated. By the way: Wikidata has an item on Ban Krang municipality already, and I have filled it with a lot of statements already.
View Larger Map

Local government terms 2009-2012

The task which kept me busy the last months was to add election data to my XML files reached a first milestone. On the website of the Election Commission, I originally found an Excel sheet with all the term ends of the local government councils and mayors in 2012, and after some more searching another Excel file for 2009 and two PDFs for 2010 and 2011. Since those files cover the last four years, in principle I should now have data for every local government unit. But actually, a few are still without - those which ended their term in 2008, but had the next election in 2009 are missing, especially the TAO upgraded to municipalities in 2008. Nevertheless an impressive number of local government units:

Year	TAO	Thesaban	PAO
2012	2201	838	76
2011	550	333	3
2010	75	210	1
2009	3589	237	1

An example entry in the XML, taken from the subdistrict municipality Khlong Cha-un in Surat Thani, looks like this

<council>
  <term begin="2012-12-16" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" />
  <term begin="2008-11-09" end="2012-11-08" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" />
  <term begin="2004-07-25" end="2008-06-30" type="TAO" size="26" endreason="StatusChange" /> 

</council>

Notice that the last term as a TAO ended about one month before the nominal end of term because the upgrade was effective a little earlier than in most cases - normally the upgrade happens on the day after the term ended. Such cases of prematurely ended terms are the most interesting ones, and will write up some articles on some types of premature ends - the end due to a status change is the least interesting one.

And I am not yet done with this huge task of adding term data, in the meantime the term ends in this year were published as a PDF, and I also found another PDF with the data for 2008. This year there will be a total of 3596 term ends, again a lot of TAO end their term since it is 4th four year period since 1997 when 3637 TAO were created. And again a significant number of these I expect to be upgraded to municipalities this year.

Local government elections this year

Finally I have found the page within the Election Commission website where they place the links to the most important reference lists. There is has the full results for the last three parliament elections, the latest senate election, and also the lists of the local government term ends starting in 2009. These lists keep me busy for some time already, extracting the election dates from there and adding them into the XML files.

Thus I now also have the list of all the term ends in this year, the actual election date for each of the local government unit will be chosen by the Election Commission when it reaches its term end. But since each term is exactly four years, this table now enables me the get the election dates in 2009. However, one big drawback is that the list is a PDF file, whereas for 2012 and 2009 there were Excel sheets. I was able to convert the PDF back to a Excel, but all of the vocals and other letters below or above the consonants were lost in the process, making it somewhat more difficult to work through the list.

Most of the 115 pages of the PDF are this list, but there are a few statistics at the beginning of the document as well worth mentioning here. This year, terms will end for the mayor and/or the council in 3596 local governments.

• 5 Provincial Administrative Organizations (only mayors)
• 341 municipalities
• 3249 TAO

And while the municipal elections are spread all over the year, September will see 2941 TAO ending their terms. Thus there will be a lot of local elections in October, but probably also again quite some number of TAO upgraded to municipalities which is normally done with the term ends. Also interesting - in 105 TAO and 21 municipalities the mayor and the council have different term ends, mostly caused by mayors who did not complete their term.

First Royal Gazette announcements for 2013

Today the first announcements relevant to the administrative subdivisions were published in the Royal Gazette, and since last year had a lot of newly created municipalities these announcements are definitions of the constituency boundaries within municipalities. Due to the larger number of these announcements I normally don't write about them, thus this is a nice chance to mention them.

• Ban Thaen (เทศบาลตำบลบ้านแท่น), Ban Thaen district, Chaiyaphum [Gazette]. The term of the municipality council will end on February 21 this year, so the change of constituencies comes in time to allow the election to take place within the 45 days after the end of term.
• Phra Sadet (เทศบาลตำบลพระเสด็จ), Lap Lae district, Uttaradit [Gazette]. The TAO Thung Yang was upgraded to a municipality effective August 24 (and renamed to Phra Sadet since part of the subdistrict Thung Yang already forms the municipality Thung Yang), so now the constituencies are defined the first municipal election can take place.
• Huai Sai (เทศบาลตำบลห้วยทราย), San Kamphaeng district, Chiang Mai [Gazette]. The TAO Huai Sai was upgraded to a municipality effective November 1st, cutting short the council term which would have run until September this year. In this case the time without an elected administration will be shorter than for Phra Sadet.

Times between local elections

As I am now adding lots of local election details into my XML, it now becomes possible to do some automatic calculation of election statistics. Though I am far from having a full coverage of the local elections of the most recent past - right now I have 4775 council elections with at least the election date - a few quite interesting things show up.

At first, most of the local election take place on either Sunday (4244 or 89%) or Saturday (410 or 9%), but there were also election on every other weekday. But it gets more interesting when I have more than one election date for a given local council, as then it is possible to calculate the time between the end of term and the election of a new council. By law, after the end of term the next election has to take place within 45 days, however this can be extended by the Election Commission. This takes place especially when the constituencies of the election need to be changed, either because the size of the council has changed, or the population numbers within the constituencies have changed significantly.

The number of days without a council within the limited data I have so far differs from 31 days, e.g. for Chiang Mai municipality earlier this year, when it had the election on April 8, exactly one month after the term ended on March 8. Quite striking however is the longest time I have spotted so far, more than once year for Pho Sadet municipality in Nakhon Si Thammarat. The TAO Pho Sadet was upgraded to a municipality effective October 7 2011, the first day after the TAO council term had expired. However, the first election for the municipal council and municipal mayor took place on November 11 2012, more than one year after the upgrade. For whatever reason, it took so long to split the area of the subdistrict into two constituencies with roughly equal population, as the constituencies were officially announced on October 10 2012, just shortly before the election date.

Right now, the median value of interregnum lengths is 52 days, however this is mostly a selection effect since I have mostly the election data for TAO upgraded to Thesaban - as soon as I add more of the recent TAO elections the number will certainly go down. But since it such a big pile of data to work through, and only part of it as handy Excel sheets which I can convert to XML code easily. In order to show how the data is represented in the XML, below is the code for the Pho Sadet council elections, snipped to show only the most relevant parts.

<entity type="Tambon" name="โพธิ์เสด็จ" english="Pho Sadet" geocode="800118">
<office type="MunicipalityOffice">
[...]
<officials>
<official title="Mayor" name="เกรียงศักดิ์ ด่านคงรักษ์" begin="2012-11-11" beginreason="ElectedDirectly" />
<official title="TAOMayor" name="เกรียงศักดิ์ ด่านคงรักษ์" begin="2007-10-07" end="2011-10-06" beginreason="ElectedDirectly" endreason="EndOfTerm" /></officials>
<council>
<term begin="2012-11-11" type="ThesabanTambon" size="12" comment="Constituencies took 1 year to finish" />
<term begin="2007-10-07" end="2011-10-06" type="TAO" size="18" />
</council>
</office>
[...]
</entity>

Ko Samui upgraded to city municipality

Four years ago, the board to consider draft laws had already decided that Ko Samui municipality (เทศบาลเมืองเกาะสมุย) - which covers the whole Samui island - should be upgraded from subdistrict municipality status to city municipality status. However surprisingly, the actual upgrade published in the Royal Gazette then just upgraded it to a town municipality, just one step higher in municipal status and not directly at the highest status.

Since I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the recent board meeting transcripts, it was now again a surprise when Khun Wisarut in the 2bangkok forum posted the link to the NathonCity website, which has the fax with the upgrade order in their news section. According to that scan, signed and send on August 12, the upgrade become effective September 14, the day after the term of the current council and mayor ends. Thus normally there should be a new election for both council and mayor within 45 days, but this depends on whether the Election Commission will be able to draw new constituency boundaries within that time - with the upgrade there are now 24 councilors election elected in four constituencies instead of 18 councilors in three constituencies.

It is somewhat strange that four years ago Samui was denied the city status, not it received it even though there was now also a change to a special administrative area like Pattaya in the discussion. I don't know any of the internals - maybe those who blocked the full upgrade last time are not in power anymore? Or drafting a law for a special administrative area couldn't be done quickly enough to be able to use the end of the terms for the status change? Or the city status was now granted to stop the request of becoming a special administrative area, which would mean even less of the tax income of Samui would go to the other parts of the province and country.

Book excerpt "The Thai Bureaucracy"

I have received my copy of the 1966 book "The Thai Bureaucracy" by William J. Siffin, and at first look it already seems like an interesting read on the history of the Thai administration. As a first teaser I am quoting the section on the local government from chapter 8 "The essential character of the contemporary bureaucracy".

A small local government service also exists outside the national bureaucracy. It has perhaps 10,000 officials and employees. Terms and conditions of employment follow those of the national bureaucracy, but the local officials work for particular municipalities, have no opportunities for mobility beyond their particular jurisdiction, and posses little prestige. Autonomous local government is not significant in Thailand. Urban municipal government (apart from the capital area) did not even exist until passage of the Municipality Act of 1933, and today more than half the nation's local officials are employed in the metropolitan cities of Bangkok and Thonburi. Outside the capital there is one city - Chiengmai - with a population approaching 100,000; about eighty towns have average population of 15,000. These data are not necessarily adequate indices of urbanization, for city boundaries do not necessarily coincide with areas of high population density. But to this point, local government in Thailand has been more nominal than real, and this is reflected in the insignificance of the local bureaucracies.

Again, there are two interesting references to older publications, but it seems these are impossible to get in print - and while Google Books has entries for them, they don't even offer snippit view of the contents, neither for Winyoo Angkanaraksa "Local Government in Thailand" nor Frederick James Horrigan "Local government and administration in Thailand".

But since the decentralization of the 1990s the last sentence of the quote is now no longer valid - now there are not just around one hundred municipalities and sanitary districts as there were in 1966, but almost 10,000 covering the whole country. And also the prestige of the positions in local administrative must have grown (or at least have become very lucrative), as otherwise there would be need for a pledge for better protection of local election candidates.

The Election Commission has asked the Royal Thai Police to ensure adequate security for local government elections being held throughout the country.
[..]
There have been reports of violence and intimidation of election candidates. Some of them have been killed, he said.
Bangkok Post, "EC asks for protection for candidates", 2012-07-09

Mayor of Wat Pradu killed

The Office of Provincial Election Commission of Suratthani had recently posted the local election calendar for this year - or to be more exact the dates when the terms of the local governments end, as the actual election date within 60 days after that day will be set only few weeks before the election. I could find several cases where I had the previous election date wrong in my XML because that news article where I found them must have been wrong; also notice that Ko Samui will see new municipal elections this autumn, so if there'd be any upgrade to a special administrative area now would be the best time, or wait another four years.

Former municipality office of Wat Pradu,
now a police station

But a small note within that table hides a news story not covered at all in the English press. It says "นายกฯเสียชีวิต 4 ม.ค. 55" - Mayor passed away January 4 2012. But it was a violent death, as Thongchai Phrikkaeo (นายธงชัย พริกแก้ว) he was shot while attending a funeral. If I am not misreading the news article I found, the assassin was caught already, but I haven't found anything yet with speculation on the reason for the killing. I wouldn't be surprised if it were around lucrative projects initiated by the municipality going to the wrong contractor...

It's not that political murder is unheard of in Thailand - quite the contrary - the scary thing is that this one happened in the municipality right next to where I am often during my vacations. And even though he was a municipality mayor, the case wasn't big enough to be covered in the English language press, the only similar cases I read about there are either those in the unruly provinces of the deep south, or when it is close to Bangkok or related with national elections, e.g. the killing of the PAO Chairman of Nakhon Sawan last summer.

I am currently reading the book "The better angels of our nature" by Stephen Pinker - very recommended despite having 700 pages - in which the author argues that the violence level has gone down significantly all over the world, and links this (among others) to the fact that more and more countries have stable, democratic governments with well-working law enforcement. Though I have no statistics on the homicides in Thailand, given news like this the country still has a long way to go - cannot recall any recent political murder in the West.

Local governments on Google Plus

Even though most of the social networking still happens on Facebook, I personally prefer the much cleaner and more professional looking Google Plus by far. So naturally I also tried if there are any of the local governments - municipalities, TAO or PAO - who are using Google Plus as well, or at least have registered there. Sadly, most have just registered there (and many as a person and not as a page, the way Google intended it), but below is a table of those I have found so far.

• Sao Thong Hin municipality (เทศบาลตำบลเสาธงหิน), Nonthaburi - a few flood photos from November last year are the only activity.
• Bang Muang municipality (เทศบาลตำบลบางม่วง), Nonthaburi. Only activity so far was the upload of their emblem as the user picture.
• Chanthanimit town (เทศบาลเมืองจันทนิมิต), Chanthaburi - no activity at all.
• Nong Bua Sala TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลหนองบัวศาลา), Nakhon Ratchasima - several post in October last year, but nothing since then.
• Doi Saket municipality (เทศบาลตำบลดอยสะเก็ด), Chiang Mai - only uploaded emblem and a sketch map.
• Thung Hua Chang municipality (เทศบาลตำบลทุ่งหัวช้าง), Lamphun - only two photos uploaded so far.
• Ngao municipality (เทศบาลตําบลหงาวหงาว), Chiang Rai - only the emblem.
• Mae Sariang municipality (เทศบาลตำบลแม่สะเรียง), Mae Hong Son - no activity at all.
• Bang Bai Mai TAO (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบางใบไม้), Surat Thani - no activity yet, at least they choose correctly to create a page and not a user profile.
• Wang Mai municipality (เทศบาลตำบลวังใหม่), Chumphon - the only one really continually active, and correctly set up as a page as well.
• Pa Bon municipality (เทศบาลตำบลป่าบอน), Phatthalung - only emblem.
• Thung Hong municipality (เทศบาลตำบลทุ่งโฮ้ง), Phrae - only emblem.

The list might be incomplete, but there are for sure only very few of the 7000+ thousand local governments registered at all, only so far only one real active.

 Though Twitter is not exactly a social networking site, I have collected the few who have found their way there in a user list which can be easily followed as well - but not surprisingly there is very few activity, of all those who created an account on Twitter only few have actually used it for more than a short testing period. Currently active are only the municipalities Mueang Phon in Khon Kaen and Nong Khai. Whenever I discover a new Twitter account I will of course add it to that list, so anyone interested can just subscribe the list.

 Additionally, I also add all these links into my XML as well, which can then look like this

      <socialweb>
        <facebook>http://www.facebook.com/bangkoknoi</facebook>
        <twitter>BangkoknoiDist</twitter>
        <blog>http://bangkoknoidist.blogspot.com/</blog>
      </socialweb>

First Royal Gazette announcement of the year

Though it was not exactly the first announcement of this year - those were published on January 3rd - yesterday the first announcement was published covering one of those topics I monitor. It was the definition of the constituencies for a municipality.

The municipality Thung Luilai (เทศบาลตำบลทุ่งลุยลาย), Khon San district of Chaiyaphum province was just upgraded effective September 30, the corresponding announcement with the upgrade has been published yet however - and judging from the time between the upgrade and the announcement it should not take too long to show.

And to make an advisement for my XML collection of the content of such announcements, here is how this first one now looks withing my coding project. If the boundaries of the two constituencies would be identical with the Muban boundaries, I could even add which Muban belongs to which constituency in that code (a new feature I added for the Buriram PAO) - but at least from the description in the PDF it is not clear which Muban belong to which constituency.

<year value="2012">
  <entry description="Constituencies of Thesaban Thung Luilai, Chaiyaphum" 

    title="ประกาศคณะกรรมการการเลือกตั้ง เรื่อง การแบ่งเขตเลือกตั้งสมาชิกสภาเทศบาลในจังหวัดชัยภูมิ [เทศบาลตำบลทุ่งลุยลาย อำเภอคอนสาร]" 

    volume="129" page="9-11" issue="1 ก" uri="2555/A/001/9.PDF" publication="2012-01-05" 

    sign="2011-12-28" signedby="อภิชาติ สุขัคคานนท์" 

    signedbyfunction="ElectionCommissionPresident">
    <constituency type="ThesabanTambon" name="ทุ่งลุยลาย" english="Thung Luilai" tambon="361305" />
  </entry>
</year>

Surat Thani municipal elections

Thirakit, probably the new mayor

Yesterday were the municipal election in Surat Thani city, both the mayor as well as the municipal council were elected. There were three candidates for the post of mayor

1. Sombun Suwannabut (นางสมบูรณ์ สุวรรณบุตร), incumbent
2. Thirakit Wangmuthitakun (นายธีระกิจ หวังมุทิตากุล)
3. Sufang Chaewong (นายสุฟ้าง แซ่หว่อง)

Sufang banners

Though the campaigning officially started August 5, four year after the last municipal election marking the end of the term in office, I was able to catch photographs of all three mayor candidates while I was strolling through the city end of May. While I was looking for posters for the national elections - and there were just very few within the city - I found one poster of each of the new candidates. Rather interesting is the banner by candidate three, which shows Sufang with an old photograph of a whale caught or stranded. I wasn't even aware that there were whales in the Gulf of Thailand except the dolphins off Khanom beach and in Songkhla lake, but now learned that Bryde's Whale also is found in the Gulf of Thailand. Sadly don't know anything about the background of that photo on the poster.

City rewire project

The poster of incumbent mayor Sombun is not exactly an election poster, but the project announcement for the rewiring in the city center, getting rid of the ugly cables on posts along the street, changing to underground cables. Back in May a lot of construction on this project was underway within the city,   and though still a lot more will be necessary to make Surat Thani an actually beautiful city it will definitely look better when this project is done. And I wouldn't be surprised of this project was started right on time to be completed with the election date. One thing I am not yet understanding - according to the municipal law a mayor is only allowed to be in office for two consecutive terms, however Sombun would have started a third term if elected. Don't know why her first term starting in 2003 apparently did not count.

The election result is interesting, according to the inofficial preliminary result  the mayor will change, as Thirakit won 17,699 votes compared to 16,406 for incumbent mayor Sombun. Sufang only won 5,791 votes.

Photo albums of administrative offices

Khanom District Office, Nakhon Si Thammarat

For some time I already had started with uploading my photos of the various administrative offices on various web 2.0 sites, but never made it a systematically and complete yet, and never could decide which one to use - Picasa, Panoramio or Flickr, or also Wikimedia Commons. But as with the start of Google+ (thanks to Rikker I am online there already) Picasa effectively dropped their quota and made all images of less than 2048 pixel free - so I can now use that image storage without ever worry about running out of space. I have already uploaded some new photos to the albums below, but still have to go through my archive to complete the albums.

Province Halls	ศาลากลาง	Album
District Office	ที่ว่าการอำเภอ	Album
Province Court	ศาลจังหวัด	Album
Municipal and TAO offices	สำนักงานเทศบาล/สำนักงานอบต	Album
PAO offices	สำนักงานอบจ	Album
City Pillar Shrines	หลักเมือง	Album

The photos are all cc-by-sa, the same license as photos on Wikipedia. So anyone can reuse them, only have to give credit to me as the photographer. And also can upload them to Wikipedia, as I somehow never find the time and mood to fill the more and more bureaucratic forms for a simple upload of a self-created photo.

Municipal changes in fiscal year 2011

With the lack of the meeting transcripts, the earliest I was expecting to know the complete municipal changes in this fiscal year (which started in October 2010) when the Department of Local Administration compiles their annual report and posts it on their local administration data page. Normally this happens around the end of the fiscal year, so it was quite surprising that already today a new word document was added to that page, which contains the whole list of municipal changes from October 1 2010 till June 20 2011. I can only suspect that no further changes are planned till October, maybe due to the forthcoming election - or they will update the document again later. Anyway, in the table below I list them all sorted by their date of becoming effective, including links to this blog and the Royal Gazette in case the change was announced already. Only the two latest ones are still pending the announcement in the Royal Gazette.

October 8	TAO Du Tai, Nan to subdistrict municipality (ทต.ดู่ใต้)	Blog, Gazette
October 28	TAO Bu Kraeng, Surin to subdistrict municipality (ทต.บุแกรง)	Blog, Gazette
October 28	Ton Pao subdistrict municpality, Chiang Mai to town (ทม.ต้นเปา)	Blog, Gazette
November 10	Wang Nam Yen subdistrict municpality, Sa Kaeo to town (ทม.วังน้ำเย็น) includes merge with TAO Wang Nam Yen	Blog, Gazette
November 11	Om Noi town, Nakhon Pathom to city (ทน.อ้อมน้อย)	Blog, Gazette
February 10	Ang Sila subdistrict municpality, Chonburi to town (ทม.อ่างศิลา)	Blog, Gazette
April 29	Rangsit town, Pathum Thani town to city (ทน.รังสิต)	Gazette
May 13	Khao Rub Chang subdistrict municpality, Songkhla to town (ทม.เขารูปช้าง)	Blog, Gazette
May 26	Wichian Buri subdistrict municpality, Phetchabun to town (ทม.วิเชียรบุรี)
June 20	Wang Saphung subdistrict municpality, Loei to town (ทม.วังสะพุง)