Most of the Roberts Commission's recommendations make sense and are well worth trying. Even if they cost money which would otherwise, at least in theory, get spent on services.
That's the challenge her commission has thrown down - to get and keep a functioning democracy, we will have to spend, on communications, on better allowances for councillors, for the razzmatazz which ought to accompany the glorious business of casting a vote and securing representation in the local areas in which we all, at least for part of our lives, live and breathe.
Don't spend or pay peanuts and what you get is what we've got: a minority business where a diminishing band of dedicated people watch the world around passing them by and all the grand claims made for local services undermined by the sheer ignorance and disregard of the population.
So Roberts' practical recommendations are fine, and long overdue. Let's link rejuvenation with voting reform, new rules which insist on time off work, better financial recompense.
But after all that you are still left with an aching gap. It's one the Roberts' report skirts around, half aware. It's the culture, stupid. How can local government be made ... sexy ... in the sense that it gets talked about, at least occasionally, by the people who watch Big Brother and The X Factor and use social networking sites.
Historically the great municipal enterprise, all those hundreds of billions of public spending flowing through the town and county halls have been culturally invisible. You can count on one hand the number of novels set in town halls and - apart from a couple of short-run comedy series and an occasional docudrama - municipal life is absent from the fictive world.
Yet unless people, especially the under-30s, start imagining where they live - and how collective decisions taken by local representatives in a formal setting can shape it better - democracy becomes ever more a minority pursuit and councils' prolonged agony over their legitimacy gets ever more intense.
Lights, action, camera: the problem is chicken and eggish. Because councillors are predominantly older and male and staider (nothing wrong with those qualities in themselves), they don't show the world a media-friendly face. Media showings are not the be-all and end-all, but they matter if local government is to tunnel into popular consciousness as a valued part of our lives together. Councils start with the tremendous handicap of newspaper indifference and antipathy: journalists are either bored or, under the influence of their right wing proprietors, actively hostile - look at the pre-coverage of the commission report in the weekend papers.
That is one reason why the commission has focused on broadcasting and the internet, to circumvent the printed press.
Winning cultural acceptance is a mountainous task. So many start with anti-political prejudice or blindly ignorant about how services are paid for and organised, or a pig-headed instrumentalist-individualist view of representative democracy.
But to her great credit, Roberts is having none of the pessimism that might follow from reciting the facts of public attitudes.
Nor can she afford to, for with her report the "new localism" about which we have heard so much in recent years is put to the test. Local services and local spending are always going to be pegged to the health of local democracy and, within that, the regard in which the local representative function is held. Unless the regeneration urged in this report starts, and soon, councils can only retreat further into the scratchy resentfulness of acting as central government's local agents.
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