Local government units name changes announced

The name changes for municipalities and TAO approved in the board meeting on August 11 have been officially announced in the Royal Gazette last week - thus it was rather fast from the board to consider name changes on August 10, next day the board to consider draft laws, on September 17 the announcements were signed by Deputy Interior Minister Boonjong Wongtrairat (บุญจง วงศ์ไตรรัตน์ - who just lost his seat in parliament because the Election Commission found him and other guilty of violating the anti-corruption laws by owning shares of companies who work for the government), and on November 5 the change was officially published.

• Samrong Tai town (เทศบาลเมืองสำโรงใต้), Phra Pradaeng district, Samut Prakan province renamed to Pu Chao Saming Phrai (เทศบาลเมืองปู่เจ้าสมิงพราย). [Gazette]
• Sattahip subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลสัตหีบ), Sattahip district, Chonburi province renamed to Khet Udom Sak (เทศบาลตำบลเขตรอุดมศักดิ์). [Gazette]
• TAO Song Hong (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลสองห้อง), Mueang Nong Khai district, Nong Khai to be renamed to Pho Sawang (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลโพนสว่าง) in accordance to the rename of the subdistrict earlier this year. [Gazette]
• TAO Suak (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลสวก), Mueang Nan district, Nan to be renamed to Bo Suak (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบ่อสวก) in accordance to the rename of the subdistrict earlier this year. [Gazette]

Another province governor transfer

Thanks to Richard Barrow, who spotted it in a Thai online news site and alerted me, the cabinet has withdrawn the province governor reshuffle list from their meeting on August 31 and September 28, and created a new reshuffle and promotion list in their November 2 meeting. Though however with regards to the province governor, the list is almost identical to the one from end of September, with only two changes:

• Thani Samarotkit (ธานี สามารถกิจ), originally transferred from the deputy governor post Chonburi to Pathum Thani, becomes governor of Buriram instead.
  
• Phirasak Hinmueangkao (พีระศักดิ์ หินเมืองเก่า), originally staying in Buriram, get transferred to Pathum Thani.
  

According to Khun Wisarut, the main political commenter (though sadly always strongly leaning to the PAD viewpoint) on the 2bangkok forum this change was done as Phirasak Hinmueangkao is expected to deal better with the red shirts still active in Pathum Thani. And as governor of Buriram he is connected with Bhum Jai Thai de-facto leader Newin as well.

Just wondering now if the two governors were counted as governors of their original assigned provinces for the last month making Thani one of the governors with the shortest terms in office, or whether the new transfer is effective retrospective and thus the original one nullified. The governor lists at the Buriram or Pathum Thani websites right now have no update yet. For my XML I have chosen the first interpretation, guessing the new transfer takes effect the day after the cabinet meeting.

Municipality Day

While looking though the "interesting articles" section of the website of the Department of Local Administration (DOLA), I stumbled on one which was titled สาร รัฐมนตรีว่าการกระทรวงมหาดไทย เนื่องใน "วันเทศบาล" วันที่ 24 เมษายน พุทธศักราช 2550 (Speech of the Minister of Interior on the Municipality Day April 24 2007). Now just few months ago I wrote about the newly introduced "Day of Local Administration" which includes the municipalities as well, so I was a bit surprised to see that the municipalities now have two commemorative days.

The Municipality Day (วันเทศบาล) was introduced in 1990, at least in was officially announced in the Royal Gazette in September 1989. If I read the text of this announcement correctly it does not give the rationale for choosing this date, but I can suggest a very likely explanation - on April 24 1934 the first Thesaban Act was promulgated by publishing it in the Royal Gazette.

So yet another entry in my Google Calendar, so I won't miss any official celebration of this kind in case I am in Thailand on any such special days.

Interpellation to create new Muban

On Monday the reply to interpellation 1112 was published in the Royal Gazette, in which the member of parliament Phumpat Pachonsap (ภูมิพัฒน์ พชรทรัพย์) asked for the split of the administrative village 9 of Phathai subdistrict, Tha Uthen district, Nakhon Phanom to set up a new administrative village. If I understand the reply by the Ministry of Interior correctly in the garbled Google translation (even more garbled than usual due to problems extracting the Thai text correctly from the PDF), the request was denied due to both budgetary reasons as well as being not necessary. But much more interesting are the points stated in the reply as being the preconditions for creating a new administrative village. These were approved by the Thai cabinet on May 14 1996, and define two different sets of rules depending on whether the Muban is in a densely populated area or in a rural area. I will write up a list with those items in details later. Only thing that amazes me a bit is that while this same set of rules are in effect for so long, the number of newly created Muban dropped so significantly after 2007 - only reason I could think of is the political chaos since the coup, which might have hindered new projects to be started.

Mueang of Isan

Another quote from Volker Grbowskys "Kleine Geschichte Thailands", in the chapter on the history of the Isan.

In dem halben Jahrhundert zwischen 1778 und 1826 stieg die Zahl der müang im Isan von 13 auf 35; für die Erschließung des Landesinneren erwiesen sich vor allem die Gründungen von Ròi Et (1775), Ubon Ratchathani (1791), Kalasin (1793) und Khòn Kaen (1797) als äußerst wichtig.

In the half century between 1778 and 1826 the number of mueang in the Isan increased from 13 to 35; most important for the development of the central area were the founding of Roi Et (1775), Ubon Ratchathani (1791), Kalasin (1793( and Khon Kaen (1797).

Now, I already wrote about the number of mueang in Isan before, quoting an article by the same author in the book "Regions and national integration in Thailand", in which the author gave the numbers for some selected years between 1826 and 1880.

• 1826 - 33
• 1840 - 54
• 1860 - 70
• 1880 - 100
• and no new Mueang after 1885
  

The number for 1826 contradicts with the new quote, but when rechecking the article I noticed that in there the above mentioned numbers for 1778 and 1826 were also given few paragraphs before - so in fact the article already contains both contradicting numbers.

And to my shame I have to admit that I still haven't worked through the scans I received last year, which would have allowed me to confirm which of the two numbers of 1826 is wrong.

Old district office of Ko Lanta

Photo courtesy Camille

Camille from Ko Samui has been traveling to Ko Lanta in the Andaman Sea, which administratively forms a district of Krabi province. By coincidence he found the old district office, a beautiful old wooden building in the historic town center on the southern island. While the building is supposed to be a local museum now, it looked like it was closed down and not kept well recently - which is quite a shame. Though Ko Lanta is still a lesser known tourist attraction, there are lots of resorts on the island already which could bring enough visitors interested in a well-kept local museum.

According to one website I found, this Koh Lanta Community Museum (พิพิธภัณฑ์ชุมชนชาวเกาะลันตา) was opened in December 2007 and is open daily, yet for Camille it looked like it has been quietly closed down in the meantime. Hope it is only a temporary closure, or a misunderstanding by Camille - I'll keep a look on his blog if he can find out any more details.

The building looks rather similar with the historic province hall of Nonthaburi, which is located right at the Chao Phraya river next to the Nonthaburi pier. Though the building there also has parts where it isn't restored that well yet, it has the local museum for Nonthaburi inside which is very much worth a visit, even though it is still only covering few rooms and is planned to have many more rooms and exhibits.

The modern district office of Ko Lanta is in the middle of nowhere still on the mainland, from the satellite image in Google Earth it looks just like most of the district offices today.

Amphoe.DOPA.go.th

While the Website amphoe.com seems to be dead - at least since October 5 the name server responsible for the domain hosted within the DOPA IP range does not answer anymore - the Department of Provincial Administration had started a new website with district information some months ago, found under the address amphoe.dopa.go.th. That website seems to be still in not yet fully set up - only about half of the districts are featured there so far, and for many it has even less information than amphoe.com had, but it seems like this is the site which was announced last year, labeled amphoe.com 2.0 by me then.

One big drawback IMHO is the fact that they chose to use the Microsoft map server as the basis, which not only has far less hires satellite data than Google Earth for Thailand, but also requires the installation of the Silverlight browser plugin. Also still a big problem is the navigation, I haven't yet found an index from where I could easily choose province and district to jump to the corresponding information page. In fact, I only stumbled upon the district information pages when Google found me the list of former head district officers for Lan Saka district, Nakhon Si Thammarat.

Sadly, the structure of URL for the district information pages does not automatically create the index, they all follow the form

http://amphoe.dopa.go.th/Shop/frontshowroom/[17..429]

with the numbers starting 17 for Ko Chang and as of today ending with 429 for Cho-airong. As I haven"t found the index page, I had to create it myself by downloading all the pages and parsing them to get the district and province name. Much smarter would have been to use the TIS1099 geocode of the province instead, e.g. use 8414 for Khian Sa district instead of the rather arbitrary 39 it now has.

But as usual, this discovery leads to more questions than answers - will this become the replacement for amphoe.com, taking over the information which was present there? Or will amphoe.com com back to life once a webmaster discovers the malconfigured nameserver? Or will amphoe.com fall to a domain grabber when the domain expires in January next year? When will the new amphoe website cover all the 878 districts?