If thinking in bullet points, I'd go for:
- well managed
- fair / transparent / communicative / responsive
- comprehensive
I've conflated 'fair / transparent / communicative / responsive' because they all work together ('justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done'), and while no-one will object to fairness, there are arguments against transparency, such as commercial confidentiality, which are relevant if local government is to commission the private sector in serving us as citizens. Similarly some people automatically think that money spent by the Council on publications such as 'Lewisham Life' are a waste of money. I don't. An organisation whose very purpose is to provide services and governance for the entire population of an area is bound to have to spend a fair bit on communications - and in this I'd include money spent on Assemblies, while reserving views on precisely how this money is spent. I'd also include in this all the standard mechanism of local democracy - elections, minuted Council meetings, etc. As for responsiveness - it has to be part of any meaningful approach to communication, but if local govt officers' time is not to be wasted, and their lives sometimes made a misery by the crazies out there, they have to be able, sometimes, to ignore what some people say, and get on with their jobs.
'Comprehensive' is probably the most difficult one, and is where I am alarmed by ideas of 'localism'. There was a historical moment in the 19th century - most famously in Birmingham - when effective local governments got rid of absurd numbers of organisations responsible for different public services in their areas, with geographical boundaries rarely the same, and forged a sense of local pride from having good local government. For some reason we have put the process into reverse, so that, to take one instance, because Mrs Thatcher wanted privatised utilities to be attractive to investors, she left them with numerous statutory powers that left local government officers at their mercy when they decide they need to dig up some bit of our roads. Of course many of the reasons for this were good - whatever some of us may think of Mrs Thatcher, she was not an idiot. But it means the pattern of local government has changed from being a provider of and decider about services - such as housing, education, social services - to merely co-ordinating them, or providing them as an agent of central government.
'Localism' would take this process further, but as long as ordinary citizens, very naturally, want to 'get on to someone at the Council' rather than have to understand who exactly is responsible for what, it will create more work for the council if it is to maintain even current levels of fairness, transparency, communication and responsiveness.