Saturday 9 October 2010

Upgrade of Ko Samui municipal status officially announced

Upgrade of Ko Samui municipal status officially announced

Andy's excellent blog about everything about the administrative subdivisions of Thailand - history, current news, facts hardly found in English, reviews of corresponding books, the Wikipedia coverage of these entities..., well, this Andy, posted about this event.

On Monday 4th October, the upgrade of Ko Samui from subdistrict municipality to a town municipality was published in the Royal Gazette. What makes this announcement a bit strange is the fact that the upgrade already happened in 2008, and thus it is published more than 2 years later. In fact, the announcement was signed by then Deptuy Minister of Interior Suphon Fongngam (สุพล ฟองงาม) on June 9 2008. This is also the date which I found in the annual list by the Department of Local Administration as the date on which the upgrade became effective.

The interesting question is why this announcement was kept in the pipeline for this long time, the median value for all the announcements I have already gathered in my XML is that the publication happens at 51 days after the signature - and now this announcement easily captured the maximum position with 847 days. The additional documents added in the announcement - the description of the boundary as well as the map - don't show any indication that were not yet present at time of the signature, the only date shown on both is the June 9 2008. Besides, preparing a map and the boundary description for a municipality which covers the complete island is nothing which should take that long.

Lots of thanks to Andy, check out his blog!

Camille

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