Upgrade of Khao Noi TAO to municipality

Published in the Royal Gazette on Saturday, the subdistrict administrative organization (TAO) Khao Noi, Prachuap Khiri Khan province was upgraded to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลเขาน้อย). I did not know about this before, as the site with the board meeting transcripts wasn't updated for quite some time, so the latest available is from September. I only noticed it shortly mentioned in the board meeting from August 9.

In this board meeting, the municipal boundaries between Khao Noi and Pran Buri were adjusted, making Pran Buri river the boundary between the two - except one small area, which is around the location of the municipality office of Khao Noi. Sadly this one isn't marked in the map within the announcement, only the district office and the land office of Pran Buri are found in there.

Municipality office disappeared

When I was visited Phra Pathom Chedi in the center of Nakhon Pathom town, I used the chance to walk around and take photos of the administrative offices around. Whereas the district office and the provincial court were easy to find. As the province hall is now located outside city, the only other building I was after was the office of the municipality Nakhon Pathom (เทศบาลนครนครปฐม), which was shown on maps directly next to the Phra Pathom Chedi.

But when I walked there, I only saw an empty lot, only the flag and the sign at the fence reminded that there was something in that place before. Only the foundations of the building were still visible. Which got me rather by surprise, as at that time in Google Earth the building was still well visible, only recently new imaginary was added which shows the space vacated. Thanks to the timeline feature in Google Earth I can say that the building was there in January 2006, and was completely gone in December 2009.

When I later checked the website of the city, the small notice at bottom confirmed the move - it says สำนักงานชั่วคราว (meaning temporary office) at Municipal School 3 โรงเรียนเทศบาล3, southwest of Phra Pathom Chedi at Ratchawithi Soi 7. I haven't yet able to find out why the old building was torn down, if it was maybe damaged beyond repair in a fire, or simply became to small already, and also don't know when (or maybe if already) the building of a new office will start.

DOPA population statistics 2010 now online

Thanks to the Firefox browser plugin Update Scanner, I noticed that the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) has uploaded the population statistics as of December 31st 2010 to their website. Well, actually not to their main website, as at that one it still has the data as of 2008, but on server still holding the old version of their website only referenced by its IP address 203.113.86.149. It was posted almost a month earlier than last year, when it appeared end of March.

Working through the data, it helped me to fix one minor bug in my software which occured in the district Wiang Nong Long of Lamphun province, one of those districts now completely covered by municipalities, and apparently the first to show in the statistics. Another thing which nearly slipped through was the fact that in Chainat the municipality Pho Nang Dam (เทศบาลตำบลโพนางดำ) was renamed to Pho Phithak (เทศบาลตำบลโพธิ์พิทักษ์) last year - and I mistakenly had the originally planned rename from the board meeting to Thep Phithak (เทศบาลตำบลเทพพิทักษ์) in the XMLs, as I failed to read the Gazette announcement well enough.

A total of 14 municipalities have been added between the 2009 and 2010 data, but only those which were already present in the latest geocode list, so I did/could not have to add any new codes to my data. Actually, this way round is the better way, I prefer to know the actual codes instead of trying to guess them from the order of entries in the statistics list. Thus there were only a few further minor points I had to change in the XML and then my software could parse the new data already. I will post some detailed analysis of the data in later posts, like the entities with largest gain or loss of population.

Number of Chumchon in large municipalities

Whereas most of the municipalities have just a handful of boroughs (Chumchon, ชุมชน), when I had a look at the website of Ubon Ratchathani recently I was surprised to find that there are quite a lot of boroughs in that city. On their map subpage, it has a map and list of 106 boroughs, and even detail maps for (almost) all of them. As the city has a population of about 85,000, this means each of the boroughs has about 800 citizen. Sadly I cannot find a table with the data for each borough, only other information piece is area which is written into each of the details map, e.g. for Chumchon 106 named Wat Burapha 2 (วัดบูรพา 2) the value is 1,436,513.09. The unit is missing, but as the whole city covers 29.04 km² it seems this is square metre and not square wa (ตารางวา).

While I already knew that Chiang Mai has a similar number of borough - 90 split between four subdistricts - the number exceeding 100 poses an interesting problem for the geocodes of the boroughs. Though they are hardly found, and I haven't yet found any complete list of these codes, it seems that they follow the system of the administrative villages (Muban) by using the last two digits of the 8 digit code. Thus the first borough Ban Kan Lueang School 2 (โรงเรียนบ้านก้านเหลือง 2) would have the code 34990001, and the last allowed code would be the 99 for Wat Si Pradu 1 (วัดศรีประดู่ 1). The final 7 borough however have no space in this system anymore.

It would only fit in case there is another level of subdivision in between - the two zeros could be used in case there are Khwaeng in Ubon Ratchathani same as in Chiang Mai, and though I have found nothing which would prove any like this the map on the Thai Wikipedia shows four areas with distinct colors. Even if these aren't official city subdivisions, using such would allow to fit in all the codes. Another possible escape would of course to use something inspired hexadecimal notation, after 99 continue with A0. The least preferred escape would be to use the last four digits for the boroughs and give borough 106 the code 34990106, as that would break the hierarchical structure of the codes.

Importance of the District Office

Mueang Samut Songkhram

The 1962 book Politics in Thailand by David A. Wilson, while it otherwise has nothing about the administrative subdivisions, in the concluding Chapter has the following interesting quote on the population structure.

...consisting of an extremely large agrarian segment and a small ruling segment. The two groups interact in a tenuous manner so that the smaller does not irrate the larger. [...] Direct relationship between the two social segments are maintained through the district office, which is highly formal and socially (and often also geographically) distant.

While there are two more administrative levels below the district, these are led by locally elected headmen, which are villages same as their electorate. Therefore the district is the lowest administrative level manned by government officials sent from Bangkok. Citizen have to visit the district office sometimes, especially for the registration services - even though these are now also possible to do in the municipality offices - but the province hall they usually don't need to visit, so the district office is the most important of the government offices for the normal citizen.

This quote describes the situation 50 years ago, and the population structure has changed a lot since then. Today there's a big middle class, and only in the northeast the agrarian sector still predominates. While working in the government sector is still very popular as the career choice, it is no longer the only way to middle and higher class. And as mentioned before, now the municipality office have taken over some of the registration services, so the importance of the district office has shrunk a bit. And finally, in the last 50 years the number of districts has grown a lot from around 500 to 928, thus the district office has come closer to the people geographically as well - and with increased mobility it is also much faster to reach than 50 years ago.

2009 TAO upgrades announced in Royal Gazette

Last Friday, a whole of 72 announcements were published in the Royal Gazette, all concerning upgrades of subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO) to subdistrict municipalities. If I am not mistaken, these are all dating back from 2009 and thus already effective for more than a year, however the announcements were all signed in October 2010. Whereas several of the few municipal changes decided in 2010 have been published timely in the Gazette already, this batch of announcements gives hope that the big backlog of similar notifications will still be processed and published.

In 2009 there were many more that just 72 changes - effective between October and December 2009 alone were 319, and another 59 in fiscal year 2009, which ran from October 2008 till September 2009. And also from earlier years most of the TAO upgrades haven't made it into the Royal Gazette yet, so there should be several more bunches of announcements like this forthcoming. I skip the tedious work of listing all those announced now in this posting, anyone interested can find them in XML format in my coding project.

All of the PDFs include the boundary definition and a map, though in some cases the map was scanned in such a low resolution it is no longer recognizable. I am still working through them to use those maps to identify the municipality office in Google Earth and add it into my automatically generated map, so far just 20 of the 72 maps are done.

As an example, the very first one on the upgrade of TAO Inthakin (อินทขิล) the map inside the PDF shows a location next to highway 107. In Google at around that location is has a small group of buildings next to a small reservoir, and also the "red dot" is placed around there, so one of the buildings must be the municipality office, most likely the one with the red roof.

View Larger Map
The location is confirmed by Longdo Map, and I might have found it there before if it weren't misspelled as อินทนิล originally.

Constitutional problems for Bueng Kan province

While the announcement for the creation of Bueng Kan must show up in the Royal Gazette before Friday in order to become effective in time, a last minute attempt to stop the act was started. As reported by Post Today, there are three issues which may pose a problem with the constitution.

• Constituencies in a 2011 election: the constitution states that the number of constituencies is to be calculated from the population number at December 31st of the previous year. However, if there is a general election in 2011 as promised by the PM, the problem is that on December 31st there was no Bueng Kan province yet, hence no basis for calculating the constituency numbers.
  
  I really wonder how this could pose a problem, as common sense would give the easy way to just add up the population in the districts which make up the new province, the same way as I did before to show there will be no effect on the seat distribution whether the new province is created or not.
• Current constituencies not fully in line with province outline. The draft law stated that constituency two of Nong Khai will become the constituency for Bueng Kan. However, this constituency does include the district Fao Rai, which will not be part of Bueng Kan province. The only question which needs to be answered is - does this require a by-election, or is it in line with the constitution to have the 50,000 citizen keep the MPs they already elected even though they technically no longer belong to the constituency. In real, it only gets problematic once a by-election in either of the two constituencies becomes necessary after one of the MP seats gets vacant.
• The senator issue. As mentioned, the act has been sped up a lot in order to be effective before February 18, in order to allow the new province to have an election senator with the next senatorial elections in three years - and not wait for nine years as it would be necessary otherwise. The possibility of a nine year waiting period has been introduced with the 2007 constitution, and while it would of course be better to improve the constitution to allow every province to have an elected senator at the next senatorial elections than speeding up the Bueng Kan law, there is no real constitutional problem regardless whether Bueng Kan becomes efffective before or after February 18th.
  

According to Khun Wisarut at 2bangkok filing this complaint is a political move as Phuea Thai men worry that they will loose the province to Bhum Jai Thai, who pushed for the province most. Which is simply stupid, as if the voters will change their mind and vote for the party which obstructed the province they wanted?