Municipal Constituency definition

Last week the first 2011 announcement of those I monitor was published in the Royal Gazette, which was about the constituency definitions for the municipal council elections in Khao Wua-Phloi Waen subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลเขาวัว-พลอยแหวน), Tha Mai district, Chanthaburi province. While this kind of announcements does not give much of information for me - especially as the boundaries are defined in words only without any map, nor much reverence to the village numbers included - one aspect of this publication is worth noting.

The announcement was signed December 21 2010 by Election Commission President Aphichat Sukhakkhanon (อภิชาติ สุขัคคานนท์), so they were published rapidly after being approved. However, the municipality was already created effective July 31 2009, thus almost one and half year after the upgrade of the TAO and the end of term of the TAO council there wasn't yet any election of a new council and mayor. I earlier programmed a small function which calculates the times between the board meeting and the corresponding constituency announcement, and this gives a mean time between the two of 188 days. Yet, in this case it was 542 days, which makes it the longest time between board meeting and constituency announcement, even 20 days more than the previous record from Bang Krathuek in Nakhon Pathom. Due to all the aborted TAO upgrades as well as some missing board meeting transcripts I cannot tell if there's currently any other municipality still waiting similarly long.

I have no idea what is the reason for these long delays, which of course prohibit the election of the new council and mayor after the upgrade. In some older constituency definitions the boundary was defined with the Muban numbers, and also in the few cases where the website of the municipality includes the constituency information it seems that usually the constituencies contain complete Muban. However for this none I have no idea if the constituency boundaries run along the Muban boundaries, but if that is the case the long time to define the constituencies would be even more surprising - as all it'd take then would be to create two groups of adjoining Muban with an approximately equal population.

Bueng Kan commission

After the law on the creation of Bueng Kan province passed its first reading in November last year, the parliament set up a commission to clear up the final problems with the draft law. The creation of this commission was today published in the Royal Gazette, titled "ประกาศสภาผู้แทนราษฎร เรื่อง ตั้งกรรมาธิการวิสามัญพิจารณาร่างพระราชบัญญัติตั้งจังหวัดบึงกาฬ พ.ศ. ...", which lists the list of the 36 members of the commission.

I haven't yet heard anything on the recommendations of this commission - only the proceedings of commission on the constitutional amendments has been mentioned in the English newspapers - nor do I yet know the dates when the second and third readings of this law are scheduled. But I am rather sure this law will be considered in the same timeframe as the amendments, so both can be effective before the long-promised new elections will be held. Especially if the amendments get approved, the Election Commission has to redraw the constituencies anyway, so it makes not any difference if they do it with a new province or without.

Abolishing of the Monthon

The monthon as the top-level administrative subdivision of Siam were abolished in 1933, shortly after the revolution which ended the absolute monarchy. In the 2bangkok forum I had read before that this step was done because the high commissioners who led the monthon supported the unsuccessful counter-revolution known as the Boworadet rebellion.

In Fred W. Riggs' book I now found not only a proof for this statement, but also some further reasons which made the monthon no longer necessary. These further reasons are in fact quoted from the dissertation of Asa Meksavan, who later became governor of Chiang Mai and the last appointed governor of Bangkok.

The counter-revolution of October, 1933, under Prince Boworadet was almost exclusively a result of provincial revolts. It was natural, therefore, for the revolutionists to form an alliance with the [province] governors to eliminate the reyalist lord-lieutenants of the monthon. Since the institution was a new one and one which the governors resented, it seemed easier to eliminate the office than to staff it with new men. [...]

Arsa offers several factors as possible explanations for this step. He suggests that the spread of modern means of communication no longer made it necessary to have an intervening level between the province and the center in order to secure co-ordination of policy. He also points to the economies which would be made possible in a time of financial stringency (these events took place at the height of a world-wide depression which had grave repercussions in Thailand) by eliminating the igh-prestige and costly monthon offices. Third, it was thought that the monthon had become an administrative and communications "bottleneck" whose removal would step up the efficiency of administrative operations. Finally, the elimination of the monthon was heralded as a democratic measure which would strengthen local autonomy.

Even though that dissertation is already 50 years old - it was published in 1961 - its title "The Role of the Provincial Governor in Thailand" sounds like an really interesting read. Too bad Google Books does not have more than just snippet view of this book.

Chumchon geocode confusion

I am now completely confused with the numerical codes for the Chumchon (ชุมชน, best translation might be "borough"), the subdivisions of the municipalities. Some time ago, I found that in Ang Thong the codes follow a simple rule, using the municipality code as the basis and then adding 00xx. Except that there's of course the problem with the lack of codes for all the municipalities, this makes perfect sense as the Chumchon are at a similar administrative level as the villages, which has a similar coding scheme.

However, now I took a look at the website of Warin Chamrap town, adjoining to the south of Ubon Ratchathani city. The page which shows the map of the town, including the full boundaries of all the Chumchon, also includes a list with the names and codes (รหัสชุมชน) of all 28 subdivisions. To my surprise, the codes there are from 34150101 to 34150128, which would be normally the code range for administrative villages (Muban) in Warin Chamrap subdistrict. Since this subdistrict is completely covered by the town municipality (it was upgraded to a town in 1995), it has no Muban anymore, so these codes are free. But nevertheless, I would have expected the codes to be 34980001 to 34980028 instead.

The pages on the Warin Chamrap website all have the possibility to add comments, so I tried my luck and posted this question there as well - though I have not much hope I will get any answer.

TAO office outside the Tambon?

So far I believed that the office of the local administrations is always located within the area they administer. But when I was working through the TAO of Tak province, and tried to add the locations of the offices into the XML as well, the TAO Ban Na came out oddly. When I first found a placemark labeled with it in Longdo map, I already wondered why it is located so close to the district office and thus within Sam Ngao subdistrict, so I put the location into the XML only as a comment. Anyway, there's no building directly at the mark, even for the district office I had to guess a bit as none of the buildings looked like the normal large district office buildings.

Now I looked into them again, I tried again to verify the location, but none of the other sources gave anything - Wikimapia only marks one school around there. The website of the TAO Ban Na was offline, but still in the Google cache, and there I found the address - องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบ้านนา (ที่ว่าการอำเภอสามเงาหลังเก่า) ม.5 ต.สามเงา อ.สามเงา จ.ตาก (TAO Ban Na, old district office Sam Ngao, Mu 5, Sam Ngao subdistrict, Sam Ngao district, Tak province). Now there are of course TAO which cover more than one subdistrict, but this is not the case here - Ban Na only covers the subdistrict Ban Na, whereas Sam Ngao subdistrict is shared between TAO Sam Ngao and the Sam Ngao subdistrict municipality.

Once I found with Wikimapia that there is a new district office located close to the Bhumipol dam airport, the old district office as the location of the TAO Ban Na became easy to place. But still, it is located within the boundaries of the municipality and thus well outside the area which is governed from there. Finally, I even succeeded to locate the municipality office, close to the new district office, only the location for the TAO Sam Ngao I failed to find.

Now I am just wondering why this TAO is such a special case. One reason could be of course the topography on Ban Na subdistrict, which covers only the mountainous areas around the Bhumipol lake and therefore hardly any bigger settlement with the infrastructure for an office building. The whole subdistrict has just a population of 2145. And I am of course wondering if this is the only such case, or if there are any other offices located outside their area of responsibility.

Government officials in deep south

Widely ignored by the international press, and also only rarely found in any of the English newspapers in Bangkok, the insurgency in the three southernmost provinces does continue unabated. One of the common victims of drive-by shootings or bomb attacks are government officials, especially those on the lower levels who get far less police protection than the province governors or district officers. In order to remember the victims, below is a incomplete list of case which I had noticed in the press in the last year.

• On May 6, Musor Daeworsanung (มูซอ แดวอสะนุง), village headman of Mu 6, Yaha subdistrict, Yaha district, Yala province, was shot on his return way from a meeting in the district office.
• On April 14, Salae Jae-useng (สาและ เจ๊ะอูเซ็ง), village headman of Mu 5, Talo Kapo subdistrict, Yaring district, Pattani province, was injured when being shot at while fishing together with his son.
• On November 6, Sakulsak Mada-oh (สกุลศักดิ์ มะดาโอ๊ะ), chairman of the TAO Pasemat (website currently unsafe!), Su-ngai Kolok district, Narathiwat province, was seriously injured in a drive-by shooting.

TAO executives pay rise

One controversial topic last month was the pay rise for the executives of the Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAO). From what I read about that in the English news, it sounded like that only the TAO mayors (นายกองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล) will get a raise by about 100% to about 18,000 Baht per month. This drastic raise as well as the weak rationale for it - to bring the salary of the TAO leaders back in line with those of municipalities and Provincial Administrative Organizations who got a similar raise earlier last year - of course asked for criticism. As the Political Prisoners blog stated, these leaders of the local administration units are quite often the ones who control the votes in their area. Even though vote buying is of course illegal, these local influential politicians control the vote mongers, as well as could already help a candidate simply by their vote recommendation.

Now I could find the corresponding announcement in the Royal Gazette - interestingly already signed December 3, so two weeks before it was first discussed in cabinet - it shows a somewhat more differentiated picture. Strangely the announcement on the previous raise does not include the actual salaries, but it was 6 years ago, so the 100% raise reduces to a 16% annual raise, still not bad but much less outrageous. And, it is not just the TAO mayors who get a raise, also its deputy and the chairman and councilors of the TAO council get a higher salary or allowance; and the actual salary also depends on the income of the TAO, so by far not every TAO mayor will receive the 18,400 Baht, those in the least productive TAOs will just get 15,800.