Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Petition on municipality upgrade

Petitions and the replies by the authority are an interesting special kind of announcements published in the Royal Gazette. Interestingly there are only exactly two of this kind on municipalities, and even more interesting both are on the same municipality - Ban Phai (เทศบาลตำบลบ้านไผ่), Ban Phai district, Khon Kaen province.

The first petition was filed by the member of parliament Premsak Phiayura (เปรมศักดิ์ เพียยุระ) on December 15 1997, and answered and published on March 4 1998. Also the second petition, filed on August 30 2001 and answered and published on July 30 2002 was filed by Premsak, who is a local of Ban Phai.

The main reason why both petitions were unsuccessful, and the municipality still hasn't been upgraded today is quite easy to see. In the latest population statistics from DOPA the municipality has 30,079 citizen, however one of the preconditions for the upgrade to either city or town status is 50,000 citizen.

Though especially the starting page of the website of the municipality is very overloaded, it also has a lot of informative contents. One thing I haven't seen in that quality before is the seal of the municipality (ตราประจำเทศบาล) - unlike most websites it is displayed here in a very high resolution version which would be print-worthy by itself already. With such a good template I could easily create a vector version which fixes the few layer alignment problems in the raster file. The full description of the emblem is also not that often found.

Following the description found there, the emblem shows the following elements
  • The chedi Phra That Kham Kaen (องค์พระธาตุขามแก่น), the symbol of the province Khon Kaen.
  • Three bamboo stems, the symbol of the district Ban Phai (Phai, (ไม้)ไผ่ means Bamboo). The number three symbolizes the three cornerstones of democracy - respect, harmony, wisdom.
  • The 15 leaves of the bamboo represent the 15 municipal officials sent by the Department of Local Administration to build the local administration.
  • and in the circle around the emblem it has the word "เทศบาลตำบลบ้านไผ่" (Ban Phai subdistrict municipality) at the top, and "จังหวัดขอนแก่น" (Khon Kaen province) at the bottom.

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