License plate graphic for Yala province

Yesterday, the background graphic for the license plates in Yala have been announced in the Royal Gazette. This is apparently the first-ever such graphic for Yala since the first such graphics were announced in 2004, at least I never saw any announcement for this province so far. The only other province which has never been assigned such a colorful background is Mae Hong Son, I can only guess that in these two provinces there was not much interest in the bidding for special license codes, as these colorful backgrounds are only available for these special codes as an additional status symbol.

The graphic shows both the hills at the border to Malaysia and the coastal landscape at the Gulf of Thailand. The two bird-cages to the left refer to the local tradition of songbird contests, the man with a blowpipe to the Negrito tribes who were originally living in the borderland to Malaysia. To the right is a postal box from the southernmost town Betong (เบตง). As it has this reference to Betong, I suspect that the graphical license plate is also used for Betong - the only district in Thailand which has its separate license plate and does not use the provincial license plate.

Though still incomplete, a lot of the graphics of the other provinces can be found in my album of the license plate backgrounds, and I also have compiled a spreadsheet showing which provinces have received a license plate in which year - as I guess most reader won't be able to read the full XML data for these announcements.

Amphoe Kota Baru still on track

I haven't heard anything from the two planned districts to be created in Yala province since 2015, when the government news reported a confusing story which read like they were already created. But since there was no announcement in the Royal Gazette, nor the latest geocode list added any codes for these, they must be still in the pipeline. But even regular searches for any websites mention the names of these two districts return almost nothing, so it felt like the planned might have been abandoned.

But just recently, the Kota Baru municipality (เทศบาลตำบลโกตาบารู) on their Facebook page added photos from a meeting on February 17, in which the location for the new district office was discussed. Sadly, while a photo of the officials inspecting a location was added, which plot of land was inspected or whether it was chosen isn't mentioned. Though I still don't know how what is the schedule for these districts, but at least it seems they are still on track.

New maps for Yala

With the two new districts in Yala forthcoming, an important task to have them on Wikipedia with a good albeit short article as soon as it is clear when they will become official are the maps. My fellow Wikipedian hdamm has created great vector maps for all provinces with the district boundaries. In order to add the two new ones I had to find the boundaries of the subdistricts, something not easy as most of the maps I knew were inaccurate or even contradicting boundary sketches, with those from amphoe.com being the closest to reality. However, that website seems to be down, maybe switched off finally after having no update for years. The boundaries shown by Google Maps when searching for subdistricts I earlier found to be partially wrong, so those are no real alternative.

The Thai wikipedian Potapt gave me the link to a great resource, a Royal Gazette announcement on the town planning (กฎกระทรวง ให้ใช้บังคับผังเมืองรวมจังหวัดยะลา) which includes a maps of the whole province with the boundaries of each subdistrict. The map on page 28 thus allowed me to created the map above based on the current SVG map for Yala - numbered are the districts already existing, in red is the new district Lam Mai (อำเภอลำใหม่), in green Kota Baru (อำเภอโกตาบารู). As I hesitate to change the maps on Wikipedia without knowing for sure when these districts will (were?) created, I keep the result in my Dropbox for now. Hopefully, the ccaatt list will be updated quickly, to know which numbers to use for the map to identify the new districts.

New districts in Yala already created?

Amphoe in Yala before the change
number 1 and 6 will change

Checking for any news on the two planned new districts in Yala province, it turned out that only one hit turned up since I was posting about that plan in March. So it seems that not much has happened, but actually that news report by the Public Relation Department dated April 17 says something totally different.

จังหวัดยะลา ได้จัดตั้งอำเภอใหม่ใน 2 อำเภอ คือ อำเภอโกตาบารู แยกจาก อำเภอรามัน และอำเภอลำใหม่ แยกจาก อำเภอเมืองยะลา โดยมีผลตั้งแต่วันที่ 2 เมษายน 2558 นี้
Yala province has created 2 new district named Kota Baru district split from Raman district and Lam Mai district split from Mueang Yala district. Effective April 2 2015.

[...] โดยออกเป็นพระราชกฤษฎีกา (พ.ร.ฎ.) ขณะนี้ เรื่องดังกล่าวจึงยังอยู่ในกระบวนการของกรมการปกครอง
The Royal Decree on this issue is still in processing by the officials.

The article then continues by giving the rationale for this change - both districts having lots of subdistricts and have their population grown, making it more comfortable for the citizen to have the administration split, and finally mentions that the names of these districts are not finalized yet, a royally bestowed name may be chosen instead of using the name of the central subdistrict.

It is a bit strange that this change was so completely unnoticed by any other Thai newspaper, as really no other online resource picked up that report, even on the website of the province a meeting from January is the only google hit. However, I currently cannot access that website, don't know why but for several months already several government websites are inaccessible. I still hesitate to modify the corresponding Wikipedia and Wikidata entries until the Royal Decree has been published, but now have to prepare the vector maps with the new boundaries. And I hope that the Department of Local Administration will update their list of the ccaatt codes soon, right now I had to invent codes for my XML file - I gave Lam Mai the 9509 and Kota Baru the 9510, and kept the subdistrict order same as it were in their previous districts.

Two new districts for Yala province forthcoming

The website law.moi.go.th used to be my prime source on planned administrative changes, most notably the municipal upgrades. However, for about a year it seems to offline or at least incredibly slow, so I wasn't able to notice important changes from the board meeting transcripts as I simply cannot even get the overview pages. Today I tried again, and though the website is still same unusable, at least Google had a cached copy of the 2558 board 2 meeting list, and the meeting on January 19 had two very interesting items on its agenda.

๑. ร่างพระราชกฤษฎีกาตั้งอำเภอลำใหม่ จังหวัดยะลา พ.ศ. ....
๒. ร่างพระราชกฤษฎีกาตั้งอำเภอโกตาบารู จังหวัดยะลา พ.ศ. ....

Two new districts were discussed to be created in Yala - Lam Mai (อำเภอลำใหม่) and Kota Baru (อำเภอโกตาบารู). Luckily, the PDF with the transcript is also available through the Google cache, so can extract some details as well.

• Lam Mai will be split off from Mueang Yala district, containing the five subdistricts Lam Phaya, Lam Mai, Lidon, Yala and Phron. Using the registration data of December 31 2014, this new district will have 26,675 citizen and 28 administrative villages.
• Kota Baru to be split off from Raman district, containing the seven subdistricts Noen Ngam, Ba-ngoi, Kalupang, Kota Baru, Yata, Buemang and Kalo. The new district will have a population of 32,186 in 34 administrative villages.

As both Mueang and Raman district have a quite big population - 165,000 and 91,000 respectively - it makes sense to decentralize the central administration in this area. I expect the official announcement in the Royal Gazette soon, so I already prepare to get the Wikidata items in good shape, and having the maps ready...