MaewNam

My lady says that Tambon Robwiang is pretty much what I would call the city of Chiang Rai. Sound about right?

Half-right. The Tambon is a central administrative subdivision, the official translation for Tambon is subdistrict. It only has a headman, elected among the village headmen within the Tambon by a popular vote. However, for many Tambon they have exactly the same area as a local administrative unit with an elected chairman and council. Rop Wiang is not like this, part of the Tambon belongs to the city (Thesaban Nakhon) of Chiang Rai, and the remaining part has a Tambon Administrative Organization (TAO or Oh.Bo.To).

VF, etc. - would the dot named mengrai on the google map out your way be described as Moobaan Mengrai in Tambon Mengrai? Is Playamengrai an Ampur Whoops again. I see Jubby already answered the last one.

Often, the dots in Google fall on the building of the local administration within the subdistrict, but sometimes the dots just points randomly into the Tambon. As there are Tambon which have two local government units - both a TAO and a Thesaban usually - there actually should be two dots then. As usually the office is in the largest Muban of the Tambon, and often the Tambon is named after the main Muban (or vice-versa) it can be the case that the Google dots really points to Ban Mengrai, as Mu 10 of Tambon Mengrai is actually named Ban Mengrai.

Phaya Mengrai is an Amphoe, but it is also the name of a local government unit, a subdistrict municipality (Thesaban Tambon) which covers parts of Tambon Mengrai and Mae Pao. And to confuse even more, the TAO Mengrai which covers the remaining subdistrict has been upgraded to a subdistrict municipality as well recently.

<snip>

The new province will be comprised of eight districts and will have 399,233 populations.

<snip>

The prospective province is located on the bank of the Mekong River with an area of 833.85 square kilometers and a population of 86,162.

I'm confused.

The writer of the article at the Public Relations Department was apparently confused as well - 86,162 is the population of the district Bueng Kan (and 833,85 square kilometer its area). But this district will just become the Mueang district of the new province, the other 7 districts were totally forgotten in that article. So except the nonsense "s" The Nation had it right.

The new district hall cum Provincial Hall is still in the same place at the end of town. Now has a lawn.

Province court. The province hall is supposed to be built a bit away from those two within the wetland area - anyone have the coordinates of that plot of land?

My question is what happened to the proposal to make Hua Hin a province?? I though it was suppose to be province number 77?

That one was shelved quite fast, it was one of the last things PM Thaksin initiated, so after the coup it was not further considered. As it was intended as a "birthday gift" to HM the King on his 80th birthday, with that date now long over this main reason for that province has disappeared. I blogged about it some time ago: http://tambon.blogspot.com/2008/02/cancelled-new-provinces-hua-hin.html

Another province creation aborted was Nakhon Suvarnabhumi, also started by Thaksin and then shelved after the coup. http://tambon.blogspot.com/2008/03/cancelled-new-provinces-nakhon.html As far as I know, none of the other provinces suggested in the recent past have gone as close to being created as these two, but there are/were several plans for news provinces: Fang, Mae Sot, Phra Narai (by splitting Lopburi), Phu Wiang, to name just the one I know about.

What's odd is that Beung Kan built a provincial hall about 10 years ago, in preparation for the day they would achieve province status. I've seen it myself, but not for a few years. I wonder what happened to it?

You are talking about the building next to the district office of Bueng Kan, right? That is NOT a provincial hall (Sala Klang Changwat), it is the provincial court (San Changwat). Despite the name, there are more provincial courts than provinces, the larger provinces can have two or three of them. The fact that Bueng Kan already has a court was one of the reasons why the creation of the new province was approved.

So what's it gonna be : "Bueng Karn" or "Bung Kan" ?

On the traffic signs บึงกาฬ is probably spelled Bueng Kan, since that is the RTGS standard transcription. In an earlier version of the standard, it would have been Bung Kan, and "Karn" is just another inofficial but relatively popular way to transcribe a syllable closed with a N sound.

Another darn Red province. No good for Dems.

It will not change a single bit for the parliament - the 6 MPs from Nong Khai will be spread between the remainder Nong Khai province and the new province, both having 3 MPs in a single constituency thereafter. I have calculated it, see http://tambon.blogspot.com/2010/07/bueng-kan-province-geocode-and.html

I am privately working on researching the administrative subdivisions of Thailand, and one thing I am doing is to collect the locations of the offices for several of the administrative entities. Yesterday I published a blog post about this collection, and today I discover it has a sub-forum here which fits the topic...

Since I am not based in Thailand and can only come there for vacations, there are only few offices where I myself could fix the location. For the district, I have a KML I downloaded years ago and fine-tuned the locations right onto the district office building where possible. Also, the province halls (Sala Klang) are usually easy to find in Google Earth. But especially the local government units - municipalities (Thesaban), subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO) or the provincial administrative organizations (PAO) it's very difficult to find locations for their offices, there's no comprehensive map with all of them, and even those I can find on maps sometimes seem to point onto an empty field in Google Earth. And if these entities have websites, these rarely include maps, and usually only sketch maps which make it impossible to find in the satellite imaginary.

Right now I have just about 900 placemarks I am fairly certain about, but there are about 10,000 entities (mostly TAO) which could be included. And if I would add the Muban (which however have no permanent office, only the homeoffice of the Phu Yai Ban) it will get incredible... So I do need a lot of help from locals who can check those locations I have already or even better add more. But you could also just play around with the KML I created.

Just heard next month on the 13th there is to be another election,one that is every 4 years and across the whole country, anybody getting bored of the elections now ?

On September 13 it has an election, but only for farmers. In Thai this election is named เลือกตั้งผู้แทนเกษตรกร. But have no idea if only farmers are banned from drinking on that day, or they are allowed to cast their vote intoxicated, or all those tourists and expats can have their drinks this time. In fact, I have no idea what the farmers are voting for, why only the farmers... On Samui, it's only 1915 people who are called to this election (Source: DOPA)

my missus told me this a few weeks ago, apparantly the democrat mp in surratthani hence Samui the infamous Suthep has had to step down and his brother is taking his place in the election. she also said it was the 30th

Right, deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban (สุเทพ เทือกสุบรรณ) has resigned his parliament seat as he had stakes of media or companies working under government licenses The Nation. The by-election to fill the vacancy in parliament will be on August 30. His brother Thani (ธานี เทือกสุบรรณ) - who had to resign his post as PAO chairman earlier this year due to election fraud - will run as the candidate for the Democratic Party. However this time the constituency may not be a save win for the Democrats - another Thaugsuban family member just recently failed in the PAO chairman by-election, and the Phuea Thai party has nominated a quite notably candidate as well, Sompon Vichaidit.

so, it appears that Samui was not given City status, for reasons unknown. I'd be interested in hearing the reasons why if you ever find them out.

I read somewhere, that the decision not to grant city status,because it would have abolished the positions of village headman.

They all rallied & got the decision reversed so to speak after it was approved from BKK.

Now I read in the paper , that the village headmen are all rallying to get their positions reinstated. So I can't really work it out.

For the village and subdistrict headmen it made no difference whether it became a town or a city, as for both municipal level they loose their job. Only if it stayed at subdistrict municipality they could continue unchanged. So the last-minute change from city to town must have had other reasons, I can only suspect it must be something about the province government which opposed the upgrade from start and that way maybe at least managed to keep some of the income from Samui into their budget. One of the differences between the three municipal level is the percentage of local tax going to the local government.

As for the headmen still rallying, the latest I know is this article from Samui Express. I doubt they have any chance to succeed, as the rule that the headman offices get abolished one year after the upgrade of the municipality is quite clear. But who knows, it seems that even in Bangkok it still has village headmen even though they were to be abolished some years ago.

How come a German software developer, living in Aachen/Germany is interested so much in the administrative subdivisions of Thailand* if I may ask ?

* and many more subjects in Thailand, reading your blog a little...

I was thinking about writing down that story in the blog already, so I only give the short version now. Married with a Thai, I discovered Wikipedia when it was still a small site and noticed that Thailand was not covered well. So both to learn more about the country as well as to fill the void I started writing the articles on the provinces, all in the English version to train my English skills more. And starting with the provinces the topic did not release me, especially because it was so difficult to find sound information without being able to read Thai, the explorer in me woke up and I researched more and more.

Pending the official endorsement by the Democrat Party, Suthep has named his brother Thanee Thuagsuban as his successor.

This explains why Thani did not run in the by-elections for the PAO chairman last Sunday, which was caused by his election fraud as ruled by the Election Committee. He was however only yellow-carded as it was considered a minor fraud, so was eligible to run for the same post again. Instead his cousin Damrong Thaugsuban run (and lost) in this local election.

There seems to be a controversy about the # of cities in Surat Thani province; one (wiki) speaks of just 1 city - Thesaban nakhon - whilst the other link (blog) speaks of 2 cities: Surat Thani city (as capital) and Koh Samui (as island).

The reason is - at first the Ko Samui subdistrict municipality was about to be upgraded to a city, and this was even already approved by the board in the Ministry of Interior, but then actually it turned out to become only a town. So Wikipedia is correct, and that blog posting only represents my knowledge at that time, see also this posting.

The administrative system is a bit confusing, especially the fact that it has "local government" and "central government" in parallel.

The central government is province (changwat), district (amphoe), subdistrict (tambon) and village (muban), all in the line-of-command of the Ministry of Interior. The two highest level have officials appointed from the MOI, the villages have a headman (phu yai ban) elected by the population but approved and paid by the MOI. One of the village headman then, also elected by the population, becomes the subdistrict headman (kamnan).

The local government is done by councils elected by the population, and this includes municipalities and subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO or SAO, in Thai O.Bo.Tho.). Especially the TAO usually cover exactly one Tambon, but not necessarily so, they can also share a Tambon with a municipality or cover several adjoining Tambon. For the municipalities it has three levels - subdistrict municipality (thesaban tambon), town (thesaban mueang) and city (thesaban nakhon). This was what happened in Samui last year, the municipality (which covers the whole district) was upgraded from subdistrict municipality to a town. As a side-effect: in towns and cities the villages loose their meaning and it has no headmen anymore, but those in Samui don't want to loose their positions...

And now the one which was elected last Sunday is the Provincial Administrative Organization, another local government unit responsible for the whole province. Actually, the election was in April 2008, this time it was only a by-election because the previous chairman Thani Thaugsuban was yellow-carded by the Election Committee for election fraud, additionally the chairman for the Samui constituency was red-carded and it had a new election for this position as well.

Hope this short version gives an idea and clears up some misunderstandings, one could easily write a book about these topics. Or a blog like my "Changwat Amphoe Tambon" :-)

As the topic of this thread is "Samui elections", the winner is Charoen Chansa (เจริญ จันทรา), as he is the winner for the Ko Samui constituency. I have no idea if his win was surprising, because the one which was surprising is the fact that Damrong Thaugsuban did not make it to win the election for the whole province. For those able to read Thai, the full results are in this PDF from the website of the Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO).

• Changwat(province) in American is a state.
  
• Amphoe is what is in American a county or parish.
  
• Tambon is equivalent to a township. They usually are just a TAO (Tambon Administration Office) that handles records and other items rather than a proper town.
  
• Mueang indicates a city, usually the capital of the Changwat.
  
• Muban means village.
  

Not fully correct, it gets muddy at the Tambon level because there we have two different administrative entities at work. At first a Tambon is a subdistrict, a division of an Amphoe (district), which is further subdivided into (administrative) villages (Muban). Both Muban and Tambon have an elected headman and some other staff which are mostly the interface between the local population and the central government, especially the Ministry of Interior.

Then there's the second part, the local administration. In most case one Tambon has one TAO which is only responsible for this one Tambon - but that's not necessarily so, as there also TAO responsible for more than one Tambon, and Tambon which have parts of their area in a municipality and the more rural parts under a TAO. And there are Tambon which only have one (or even more than one) municipality. Both TAO and municipality have responsibilities like sanitation (garbage collection) or schools, and the actual amount of tasks depends on the municipal level.

Here the term Mueang comes in. This is even more ambiguous - before 1916 the provinces were named Mueang, the central district of each province (except Ayutthaya) is named Amphoe Mueang, and finally the 2nd municipal level is named Thesaban Mueang.

Enough lecturing on the administrative system (if interested have a look at my blog), back to the actual question on Nong Krot (หนองกรด). There are actually two such Tambon in Nakhon Sawan province, one in Banphot Phisai district, and the one probably meant in Amphoe Mueang Nakhon Sawan, close to the town Nakhon Sawan itself. A little bit can be found on Thai Tambon (but only in Thai), sadly the website of the TAO seems to be offline. Part of the Tambon belongs to the subdistrict municipality Nong Pen (เทศบาลตำบลหนองเบน), which apparently does not have a website either.

If anyone manages to find a really good reliable source for these stats kindly pm me.

The Department of Provincial Administration has annual statistics down to the Tambon level, and also separating the municipal (thesaban) areas from the rural ones. For example for Nakhon Ratchasima it is at www.dopa.go.th/xstat/p5030_01.html - yet one has to do a bit of calculation as the number listed for Amphoe Mueang are only the non-municipal ones. I did some programming myself to access these statistics much easier - according to that statistics there are 429,853 in Amphoe Mueang Nakhon Ratchasima, of which the city itself (the whole Tambon Nai Mueang) has 146,201. The numbers in Wikipedia originate from these statistics, even though the one who updates them uses the real-time data, not the annual statistics.

I suppose these statistics count the number of people registered in in each area, which does not necessarily mean they also live there, so it's only an estimate, but the best one can get. The last census was done in 2000, but I am not sure how they counted there, as also in the census the population in Bangkok was much lower than one would expect. The next census will be in 2010, I hope they will find a way to overcome the systematic errors then.

Quoting other sources has one big problem if they don't list HOW they got to that numbers, if they don't use the DOPA numbers there must have been assumptions on the deviation of the DOPA number vs. reality. And I am quite sure many don't known the difference between "thesaban mueang" and "amphoe mueang", so they consider the whole district (or maybe even the whole province) as the same as the municipality. And as already mentioned the question whether the urban sprawl is included (how far?) or not.

With the ongoing election (and the money/promises thrown in) I started wondering about Samui's exact status again. So is Samui now a Tessabaan Muang and if yes what is the difference between city status and Tessaban Muang status?

Yes, it now IS a thesaban mueang, though strangely at first it was decided to make it a thesaban nakhon same as requested by the former mayor. Sadly I haven't found anything explaining this last minute change to the lower status, if anyone can explain me it'd be nice.

The difference between thesaban mueang (town) and thesaban nakhon (city) is the responsibilities of the muncipality, the city has more responsibilities - but sadly I cannot list which it is exactly. It also has a larger muncipal council (24 vs 18 members). Yet both in contrast to the subdistrict municipality (thesaban tambon) mean the village headmen (phu yai ban) and subdistrict headmen (kamnan) loose their job as these loose their tasks to the municipality.

As Pattaya was mentioned in the thread - Pattaya has a special municipal status outside the thesaban system, if anything it is most close with the thesaban nakhon however. Bangkok is the second special municipality, which however unlike Pattaya is also at provincial level.

Stupidly the forum does not allow me to post URLs, I would have pointed you to my blog where I wrote about the Samui municipal changes several times as well as a link to the paper "Central-Local Government Relationship in Thailand" explaining a lot on the local government in Thailand.

Guys, I am new here. Just wondering how can an area in thailand acquire city status?

Do you mean the actual city status (thesaban nakhon, เทศบาลนคร), or more generally any of the three level of municipal status, as there's also thesaban mueang (เทศบาลเมือง, usually translated town) and thesaban tambon (เทศบาลตำบล, subdistrict municipality). For each of these levels it has a some minimum requirements in terms of population number and tax income, as well as the approval of the inhabitants. Originally it also had a requirement on the population density, but it seems this has been dropped.

There are sadly not many English websites on the topic, you can of course start with the Wikipedia article on Thesaban, which however is still quite short. I am also trying to cover the administrative entities in my blog, and the local administration is currently the most active topic.

'Surat Thani Governor denies cityhood to samui' says Samui Express - its not on the website yet but its in the newspaper.. any thoughts?

Apparently it wasn't successful. On March 14 the board within the Ministry of Interior responsible for the local administrative units had the issue of Ko Samui on their agenda, and if I read the transcript of the meeting correctly they decided that the upgrade to city status will be done, effective on April 19.

See also on my blog. Strangely I haven't seen about it anywhere else yet, neither this forum, nor the Samui Express website (which is again a month behind the paper version), and also the municipality website still says thesaban tambon. Below is the relevant part from the transscript

3.7 ร่างประกาศกระทรวงมหาดไทย เรื่อง เปลี่ยนแปลงฐานะเทศบาลตำบลเกาะสมุย

อำเภอเกาะสมุย จังหวัดสุราษฎร์ธานี เป็นเทศบาลนครเกาะสมุย

ผู้แทนกรมส่งเสริมการปกครองท้องถิ่น ชี้แจงว่า จังหวัดสุราษฎร์ธานีรายงานขอเปลี่ยนแปลงฐานะเทศบาลตำบลเกาะสมุย อำเภอเกาะสมุย เป็นเทศบาลนครเกาะสมุย โดยเทศบาลตำบลเกาะสมุย จัดตั้งตามพระราชบัญญัติเปลี่ยนแปลงฐานะสุขาภิบาลเป็นเทศบาล ปี 2542 มีพื้นที่ 252 ตารางกิโลเมตร จำนวน 7 ตำบล 39 หมู่บ้าน ประชากร 50,668 คน อาคารบ้านเรือน 33,148 หลังคาเรือน รายได้จริงไม่รวมเงินอุดหนุน 440.96 ล้านบาท รายจ่ายประจำ 45.02 ล้านบาท สมาชิกสภาเทศบาลตำบลเกาะสมุยจะครบวาระในวันที่ 18 เมษายน 2551 และประสงค์จะจัดตั้งเป็นเทศบาลนครเกาะสมุย ตั้งแต่วันที่ 19 เมษายน 2551 เป็นต้นไป

Would Koh Phangan and Koh Tao get classified under Samui?

No, I think you confused the local administrative structure "city" (thesaban nakhon) with the central administration structure province (changwat). For the central administration everything stays the same, Ko Samui is a district (Amphoe) subdivided into 7 subdistricts (tambon), while Ko Phangan stays to be another district which Ko Tao being one of the three subdistricts of this district. And they all stay to be part of Surat Thani province.

Did the upgrade to city status already happen? Yesterday I searched a little bit for เทศบาลนครเกาะสมุย, and came across an article in Siam Rat. To bad my Thai is still not enough to really read it, but if the part I can read says that Ko Samui became city on February 23. Or do the words before change the meaning that they applied to become city then?

I have also blogged about it here: http:// tambon.blogspot.com/2008/03/ko-samui-to-become-city.html