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Lapu-Lapu City officials are seeking clearer commitments from power agencies on when the electricity supply situation will improve, while the Cebu Provincial Government is set to resume a four-day workweek beginning September 28 as part of its energy conservation efforts.

During the Lapu-Lapu City Sangguniang Panlungsod’s session last week, representatives of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) and Mactan Electric Co. (Meco) were asked to explain the continuing supply shortage, rotational brownouts and rising electricity bills affecting consumers.

Vice Mayor Celedonio Sitoy, who presided over the Question Hour, said NGCP could not provide a definite timeline for the end of rotational brownouts, citing insufficient generation capacity and several power plants that remain unavailable.

‘NGCP discussed the problem, and we really have a shortage in power supply. They suggested adding more power plants. They said some power plants have broken down and can no longer be repaired,’ Sitoy told reporters in Cebuano.

The Visayas grid was again placed under yellow alert on Sunday due to scant contingency reserves.

Sitoy said he did not expect the supply problem to be resolved within the next two months, citing the need for additional generation capacity.

‘The problem is really the lack of generation power. We need a larger generation capacity,’ he said.

Power costs

ASIDE from interruptions, the Lapu-Lapu City Council raised concerns over electricity bills and the various charges passed on to consumers.

Meco explained that as a distribution utility, it has limited control over generation and transmission costs that form part of consumers’ bills.

These include generation charges paid to power suppliers, transmission wheeling charges collected by NGCP and ancillary service charges used to maintain backup reserves for grid stability.

The council has adopted several measures in response to consumer complaints.

Resolution 17-2233-2026, approved on July 15, asked the Department of Energy and ERC to conduct a review and audit of generation, transmission and other mandatory charges collected from Meco consumers. It also sought an examination of MECO’s power supply agreements, meter reading, bill computation and billing procedures.

On Sept. 7, the council approved Resolution 17-2518-2026, urging Meco to provide timely, feeder-specific brownout schedules identifying affected barangays and areas, the expected duration of interruptions and projected restoration times.

A third measure, Resolution 17-2524-2026, approved on Sept. 16, formally invited NGCP, ERC and Meco representatives to the Question Hour. The session was attended by officials from the three agencies, including NGCP Assistant Vice President Neil Modina, ERC Attorney III Mary Elizah D. Castillo and Meco Chief Financial Officer Julito O. Gultiano Jr.

Sitoy said the ERC had yet to present a concrete action plan addressing the concerns raised by the council. He said he would coordinate with Lapu-Lapu City

Mayor Ma. Cynthia King-Chan on possible measures to assist consumers affected by the power disruptions and higher electricity costs.

At the national level, Lapu-Lapu City Rep. Junard Chan is among the principal authors of House Resolution 1430, filed Sept. 7, seeking a congressional inquiry into ancillary service charges, the availability and actual delivery of backup reserves, and the status of generation, energy storage and transmission projects in the Visayas.

Four-day workweek

THE Cebu Provincial Government will again implement a four-day workweek beginning Monday, Sept. 28, as part of efforts to reduce electricity consumption.

Under a Sept. 23 memorandum issued by Gov. Pamela S. Baricuatro, provincial government offices and departments are encouraged to adopt a Monday-to-Thursday schedule, with working hours from 8:00 a.m. to noon and 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The arrangement will remain in effect until further notice.

The measure was issued pursuant to Executive Order 16, series of 2026, which cited the need to reduce energy consumption. The provincial government had previously adopted a four-day workweek in March amid rising fuel prices.

The latest move comes as Central Visayas continues to experience electricity supply constraints, while petroleum prices are also rising.

The provincial government said the compressed workweek is intended to manage energy consumption while allowing essential government operations and frontline services to continue.

Several offices, however, will retain their regular operating schedules.

These are the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Cebu Provincial Health Office, Provincial Social Welfare and Development Office, Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, and Cebu North and South Bus Terminal.

The Provincial General Services Office, Provincial General Office and Provincial Treasurer’s Office have also been encouraged to assign personnel who will maintain regular Monday-to-Friday office hours.

At a circuit built to punish the smallest miscalculation, the tenth Azerbaijan Grand Prix delivered one of the tightest finishes in its history – and handed George Russell the release he had been chasing since June

By the time the chequered flag fell, six cars would not see it. That fact hung over the Baku City Circuit before a wheel had turned, a quiet warning under a hardening evening light along walls the sport has now raced beside for a decade.

Wind came off the Caspian in short, testing gusts, rattling the flags above the castle stone and reminding the tens of thousands packed into this corridor of medieval architecture and Soviet-era boulevard that the track does not forgive distraction. Ten years into its residency on the calendar, Baku still carries a reputation it has never bothered to shed: a street course that looks manageable on a sighting lap and turns vicious the moment fuel loads and tire wear enter the equation.

Azerbaijan built its modern identity on a 19th-century oil boom that made Baku one of the world’s first great petroleum capitals, and long before that it sat astride the Silk Road, the corridor where Europe and Asia traded goods and architecture for centuries – a history still standing in Icherisheher, Baku’s walled Old City, where the 12th-century Maiden Tower and the Shirvanshahs’ Palace form a UNESCO World Heritage site. The circuit doesn’t skirt that history; it threads modern grandstands past medieval fortifications before opening onto the glass-and-steel Flame Towers, cars topping 200 miles per hour a few meters from walls older than the nation itself.

Baku has always operated on a different physics than the rest of the calendar. The escape roads are generous, almost inviting, which is precisely the trap. During practice, drivers had ducked into them all weekend with no real cost. Kimi Antonelli found the one exception to that leniency the previous day, planting his car into the barrier near Turn 8, the Castle Section – at 7.6 meters across, the narrowest corner left on the Formula One calendar, a stretch so tight that cars routinely graze the centuries-old stone on one side while brushing the wall on the other, with almost no room to correct a mistake before one of them does it for him. The message going into Sunday was blunt: with full fuel tanks and a race to lose rather than a lap to bank, the margin for that same error would not exist. Antonelli would start from the middle of the pack carrying that knowledge like a bruise, a championship leader suddenly forced to play catch-up on the one weekend where patience and recklessness look almost identical from the cockpit.

For Isack Hadjar, the weekend carried a different weight entirely. Three races removed from the grid after an injury layoff, he arrived in Baku having barely climbed out of the simulator – his team’s words, not embellishment – to find a car that had evolved without him. He had spent his idle Sundays watching Liam Lawson do competent, unspectacular work in his seat, and there is a particular kind of pressure that builds in a driver who knows exactly how replaceable he looked from the outside. His practice pace was cautious enough to alarm his own team. Qualifying told a different story. He banked every lap, extracted what the car offered, and rolled off the grid in a position that suggested the caution had been calculation, not rust.

It showed on Sunday. Verstappen, by contrast, spent Saturday fighting something he never quite solved. He had topped final practice with pace that made rivals recheck their own sector times, but qualifying left him irritated about a car that refused to sit still under braking, and he would ultimately line up from a distant eighth. Baku demands a ride height low enough to court disaster and a suspension stiff enough to survive the bumps, and when Red Bull doesn’t thread that needle exactly, the car turns unpredictable. Verstappen described losing half a second down the straights, a complaint that pointed toward the engine rather than the chassis. Starting eighth and finishing second is its own quiet indictment of a Saturday gone wrong, and its own quiet testament to a Sunday recovery drive that nearly rewrote the result.

Williams arrived with the kind of upgrade package teams talk about for months and then quietly downplay the week it lands. James Vowles had promised something substantial to his stakeholders, and it delivered more than the paddock murmur suggested: fifty-one uninterrupted race laps became a data-gathering exercise for the winter, and Carlos Sainz brought the package home in the points. Alex Albon’s race ended early in one of the day’s several crashes, proof that Baku’s walls do not distinguish between a car on new parts and a car on old ones.

Russell had arrived at this weekend still carrying the sting of Monza, where his own teammate had scythed through the field late on and taken a result away from him – a memory he has called chastening. Once the lights went out, he converted pole into a lead he would spend the next two hours defending, not chasing points so much as chasing the feeling of winning again. Afterward, he credited Antonelli’s near-flawless run atop the standings but made clear his own focus had narrowed to himself alone – that if he kept producing performances like this one, whatever happened by season’s end, he could live with it, given how difficult the stretch behind him had been. Baku’s long front straight became the stage where that stretch ended.

Two safety car periods turned a comfortable lead into a live contest. Russell had built a cushion of several seconds inside the opening ten laps, but each intervention – including a chaotic multi-car scramble that eventually claimed Lando Norris’s race alongside both Alpines of Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly – reset the gap and dragged Verstappen back into striking range. The compressed restarts brought Verstappen close enough to smell the exhaust ahead of him, and through the final stint the gap narrowed lap by lap into something the pit wall could no longer measure comfortably.

They crossed the line separated by 0.196 seconds, one of the tightest finishes this address has produced in ten years of hosting it. Russell took his eighth career victory, his first since Austria earlier this season – a result that felt less like a statistic and more like oxygen returning to a driver who had spent recent weeks defending his position rather than expanding it. Verstappen crossed second, still hunting his first win of the season, visibly frustrated that half a second of straight-line pace and a lost qualifying lap had been the difference between chasing and winning. Isack Hadjar completed the podium in third, giving Red Bull a result the team had gone a considerable stretch without tasting: both cars, side by side, on the top step’s flanks. Speaking afterward, Hadjar described the six weeks away as long ones, and said he had deliberately taken his comeback step by step rather than forcing it – an approach that had delivered, in his words, his first genuine podium built on pure pace rather than circumstance.

Charles Leclerc brought Ferrari home fourth, a tidier result than the team’s shaky long-run pace in practice had suggested was coming, with Lewis Hamilton following in sixth. Antonelli’s recovery drive supplied the afternoon’s quieter drama: sixteenth to fifth, eleven positions reclaimed through patience rather than desperation, enough to preserve his championship lead even as it shrank to sixty-six points. Baku served notice that the remaining street circuits will not hand him anything for free, and Sepang’s very different demands arrive next.

Further down the order, the race turned unforgiving in exactly the way Baku always does. Racing Bulls team-mates Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson tangled with each other in an incident significant enough to draw its own post-race scrutiny, with Lindblad recovering to snatch a points finish from Esteban Ocon right at the line, the two separated by three-hundredths of a second. Haas took full advantage of the disorder around them, Ocon and Ollie Bearman both scoring to pull clear of an Audi team that had arrived in Baku with its own package of updates and left with comparatively little to show for it.

Three-hundredths of a second in the midfield. Two-tenths at the front. 7.6 meters of asphalt at Turn 8, where the walls of a medieval fortress leave no room for a car to be anywhere but exactly where it needs to be. Ten years into hosting this race, Baku’s ribbon of stone and concrete has built a private reputation for reducing entire afternoons of strategy, tire management, and mechanical anxiety down to numbers too small to argue with. This year, that ruthlessness worked in George Russell’s favor. He will take it. On this anniversary weekend, almost nobody else got to.

The barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections scheduled for November 2, 2026 have been moved to November 2028, after President Marcos signed Republic Act 12326 fixing the terms of barangay and SK officials at five years.

Those elected in October 2023 will therefore remain in office through the May 2028 national and local elections before they themselves have to face the voters again.

President Marcos said the longer terms should provide stability and give barangay and SK officials sufficient time to complete their programs. There are reasonable arguments for giving local officials more time to govern instead of repeatedly putting them through elections.

Still, you have to wonder about the politics of extending the terms of tens of thousands of grassroots officials through a presidential election.

We are not the only ones wondering. Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) chairman Roland Simbulan says the administration could benefit politically from keeping incumbent barangay officials in place through the 2028 national elections. The National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) has also opposed the postponement.

Barangay elections are officially nonpartisan, but Philippine politics does not suddenly become nonpolitical when you reach the barangay hall. The barangay captain knows the families, who needs medicine, a job, ayuda, a clearance or assistance from City Hall. He knows who belongs to which organization, who can bring people to a meeting and, inevitably, who votes where.

That intimacy is both the strength and weakness of barangay government.

There is another oddity in all this. For all the money and authority entrusted to barangay officials, the legal qualifications for the job are remarkably modest: citizenship, residency, voter registration, minimum age and the ability to read and write Filipino or a local language or dialect. No degree, civil-service eligibility or demonstrated knowledge of budgeting, procurement or public administration is required.

Marunong bumasa at sumulat.

To be fair, we don’t require a college degree from mayors, congressmen or senators either. You don’t even need one to become President of the Philippines. Perhaps that explains a few things.

But the barangay is where government becomes intensely personal. These officials handle public money, approve expenditures, participate in procurement and exercise authority over people who are literally their neighbors.

We used to think of corruption as something that happened in high places, involving presidents and their cronies, Cabinet secretaries, generals, congressmen, governors, mayors and big contractors. Somewhere along the way, it worked its way farther down the political and bureaucratic ladder until even the smallest unit of government was no longer immune.

There is no shortage of examples. The Office of the Ombudsman has prosecuted barangay officials for kickbacks, rigged procurement, misuse of public funds and ghost employees. A Manila barangay chairman was convicted after demanding and receiving money from a supplier handling barangay projects. Officials of another Manila barangay were convicted over procurement of a projector and sound system in which the purchase order identifying the supplier had already been approved before the scheduled bidding. Another chairman was convicted of malversation involving wages paid in the name of a dead street sweeper.

The Sangguniang Kabataan has not been spared. Two Makati SK chairpersons were suspended this year over separate alleged irregularities. One was suspended for six months after allegedly demanding a 20-percent kickback from a supplier for a Halloween project. The other was suspended for three months in a case involving allegedly falsified signatures on documents, including that of an SK kagawad who was in Canada. The DILG said criminal complaints would be pursued.

The SK was supposed to introduce young Filipinos to leadership, public service and democratic participation. Unfortunately, young people can also learn from the political environment into which we put them.

Covid showed us something more troubling: what could happen when considerable authority was suddenly pushed all the way down to the barangay. During the lockdowns, barangay officials became neighborhood policemen, border guards and welfare officers almost overnight. They manned checkpoints, enforced curfews and quarantine restrictions, monitored movement and helped administer government assistance. Many did difficult and necessary work. Others demonstrated what petty power without enough restraint could look like.

In March 2020, five alleged curfew violators in Barangay Gatid in Santa Cruz, Laguna were locked inside a dog cage. Two were minors. Police said the barangay chairman allegedly threatened to shoot them if they refused to enter. Criminal complaints for violation of the child-protection law, grave threats and coercion followed.

Then there was ayuda. By the end of 2020, the DILG said it had investigated 367 Social Amelioration Program-related cases involving 782 complainants and 1,278 suspects. The allegations included graft, robbery-extortion and grave threats, while other complaints involved beneficiary lists and the distribution of assistance. The Ombudsman also ordered the preventive suspension of 89 barangay captains over alleged irregularities involving the first tranche of SAP.

These cases don’t indict every barangay official. They expose the danger of putting public money, assistance and considerable discretion in the hands of local officials without enough accountability.

Who gets ayuda? Who gets a barangay job? Who supplies the barangay? Who gets the project? Whose relative gets hired? Who gets endorsed to City Hall?

And somewhere above this ecosystem sits the mayor.

Nobody needs a political science degree to understand why barangay captains can be useful to mayors, congressmen and national candidates. Philippine political machinery doesn’t begin in some air-conditioned campaign headquarters. Much of it is built from the ground up, street by street, precinct by precinct, barangay by barangay.

Which is why the timing of this extension matters. The officials whose terms have just been extended will still be sitting in their barangay halls when Filipinos choose their next President, vice president and other national and local officials in May 2028.

That doesn’t prove there was a political bargain behind the extension. But it is reason enough to ask why the voters themselves were not allowed to decide who should still be sitting in those barangay halls by then.

Republic Act 12326 does contain reforms worth acknowledging. Barangay officials are limited to two consecutive terms in the same position, while SK officials remain limited to one. Continuing training and capacity building are mandated.

But there is a difference between deciding how long future officials should serve and changing the tenure of people already elected under a different timetable.

The next BSKE was originally scheduled for December 2025. Congress moved it to November 2026. Now it has been moved to November 2028.

Election lawyer Romulo Macalintal, who successfully challenged an earlier BSKE postponement before the Supreme Court, is questioning the new law as well. He argues that the cumulative delay has prolonged the tenure of incumbent officials without requiring them to obtain a fresh mandate from the electorate.

There is precedent for questioning these postponements. In 2023, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the law that had moved the December 2022 BSKE to October 2023, ruling that it violated the freedom of suffrage and failed substantive due-process requirements. Congress has broad authority over barangay elections and terms, the Court said, but that authority is not unlimited.

Justice Marvic Leonen was already describing repeated postponements as an ‘alarming trend.’

Yet here we are again.

The new law became public only days before the scheduled September 28 start of the filing of certificates of candidacy. Comelec had been preparing for an election required by existing law. Then, practically at the door of the filing period, there was no election.

Maybe most incumbents are doing good work. Maybe their constituents would have reelected them anyway.

Then let them vote.

That is the part that gets lost whenever politicians debate whether three, four or five years is the ideal term for a barangay official. The term belongs to the office. The mandate belongs to the voter.

Congress can change the first.

It should be very careful about extending the second. ###