Holdovers and high water

Fifty-one barangays went underwater on August 17. In the hardest-hit areas — Calubihan and Sambag, Jaro — the people directing the evacuations were running on empty as their electoral mandate expired last December.

When the operations center issued the rainfall advisory, local disaster committees in Jaro and Mandurriao had to decide when to call for evacuation. They had to decide, months earlier, whether to obligate their 5-percent disaster funds for pre-emptive creek clearing.

Barangay budgets are small, but the discretion over evacuation timing and drainage easements is not. And accountability for that discretion runs exclusively through the ballot.

Now, 64 lawmakers backing House Bill 10591 want to take that ballot away.

The postponement case is not frivolous. Elections cost money. The Commission on Elections budgeted PHP 19 billion for this cycle. House authors point to global shocks — an energy emergency, the US-Iran war — and argue a developing nation cannot afford triennial local polls. If we scrap the vote, we save the unspent PHP 11 billion.

Iloilo City’s entire comprehensive drainage plan requires PHP 6.2 billion. The math presents a seductive tradeoff: cancel a political exercise, build the drains.

But that assumes the money saved actually buys resilience.

Comelec chairman George Garcia notes that PHP 8 billion is already gone — spent on training, deployment, and perishable supplies. You cannot refund indelible ink. Savings are a one-time accounting trick and the governance vacuum compounds.

Look closely at the legislators pushing this delay. Cross-reference the authors of HB 10591 against the 2025 and 2026 monsoon flood maps. Check their districts against the Department of Public Works and Highways flood control allocations. The DPWH is asking for PHP 107.4 billion for flood control in 2027. If lawmakers sitting in flooded districts that receive billions in flood money want to strip citizens of a local vote, it is now a suspicious pattern, not just coincidence.

We are witnessing the severe localization of climate risk. The Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities argues that resilience requires nature-based solutions and early warning systems. Those operate at the barangay scale. Yet that is the exact layer of government being left without a fresh mandate.

A delay to 2027 or 2028 also erases a generation. A 15-year-old during the October 2023 Sangguniang Kabataan elections is 18 now. Postponement ages an entire cohort out of the system.

The fix costs money. Taxpayers will eat the PHP 19 billion bill to hold the November 2 elections, knowing that cash could have funded local drainage twice over. We pay for the democratic mechanism because the alternative is worse.

National accountability machinery has wound down, while the Independent Commission for Infrastructure ended operations in March. The only accountability mechanism left is local. When the waters rise again near outfalls, the informal settlers taking the brunt of it need a leader who actually owes them their seat.