Congress has ratified the bicameral conference committee report on the rescheduling of the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections from December this year to the last Monday of October 2023. The enrolled bill goes to Malacañang for signature of President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. The chairperson of the Senate committee on electoral reforms and people’s participation, Senator Imee Marcos, has explained that the postponement gives the legislature additional time to enact long-delayed reforms in both grassroots organizations. According to the Commission on Elections (Comelec), more funds are needed if these polls will be held next year. This is because there will be additional qualified voters who would have reached voting age. In less than a month after voter registration resumed last July, an additional 2,936,979 voters had been registered. The Senate vowed to review the budget for these polls. The Comelec has declared that the amount of ₱18.441 billion should be provided for in the 2023 budget, or more than double the ₱8.441 billion allotted for the elections originally scheduled for this year. In view of the postponement, the holdover provision shall apply. This means that "until their successors shall have been duly elected and qualified, all incumbent Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan officials shall remain in office, unless sooner removed or suspended for cause.” The incumbent officials, who were elected in 2018, will have served a total of five years by the time of the holding of next year’s elections. More than half of that period spanned the coronavirus pandemic outbreak. It was characterized by protracted quarantine and lockdown periods in which barangay officials were pressed into duty to ensure the orderly observance of health and safety protocols. Beyond the one-year postponement of the elections, it is imperative that Congress take stock of the significance and role of Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan officials. Barangay officials are at the frontlines of local governance that covers an entire gamut of concerns from implementation of laws to holding fiestas, as well as dispute resolution at the community level before this is elevated to the first- and second-level courts. Also worth looking into is the size of barangays. In the city of Manila, there are 866 barangays covering an area of 42 square kilometers; in Quezon City, there are only 142 barangays covering an area of 171 kilometers. There are 21 barangays per square kilometer in Manila; in Quezon City, each barangay covers an area of less than one kilometer. With a population of 1.78 million, each barangay in Manila has 2,055 constituents. Quezon City has a population of 2.936 million, or an average of 20,676 per barangay. Despite these apparent disparities, there is no question that both of these cities could well afford to support the barangays’ needs, given their hefty annual revenues as centers of business and industry. The citizenry expects Congress to do its homework; it must enact legislation that would strengthen the institutions of local governance: the Barangay and the Sangguniang Kabataan.