Kong Khwai TAO upgraded to municipality

Yesterday, the upgrade of the TAO Kong Khwai (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลกองควาย) to a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลกองควาย) was announced in the Royal Gazette. It is probably effective as of November 30, the date the announcement was signed by the Deputy Minister of Interior Chuchart Hansawat (นายชูชาติ หาญสวัสดิ์). The issue was discussed in one of the last board meeting transcripts I could find, meeting 52/2010. However, in that meeting no date was set for the upgrade

There are however two interesting things around this upgrade. At first, this change was not listed in the document with the municipal changes for the current fiscal year yet when I last downloaded it, as it was only including the changes till October 7 (plus two scheduled ones, one for November 30 and one for December 21). Thus it does not mention Kong Khwai, and I have to hope for an update of the list by DOLA to see if there are more upgrades forthcoming.

The second strange thing is the timing. Almost all the upgrades of TAO and municipalities happen when the term of the council and mayor has ended, to avoid local elections to happen to often. However, in this case the latest election was in February 2009, thus it is now mid-term.

An interesting observation - on the Thai Wikipedia the article on the subdistrict Kong Khwai as well as on the district Mueang Nan was updated by an anonymous editor earlier today. Sadly, on the English Wikipedia I am still alone to keep the pages up to date, and thus many of the municipality status are still not correctly there.