Well I have been a Dish customer since 1998. If you had been here that long you would remember no local channels. You would remember the 2003 Dish effort to merge with Direct TV because GM (Hughes Electronics)was running DTV into the ground. The US government blocked that. Dish wanted access to Direct TV's locals and adding the Direct TV customers would greatly enhance Dish's ability to negotiate with all the channel providers. Cable TV hated that idea and lobbyist were out in force. Go check out archived news reports and you will see the power cable companies have.
So Dish put up its own birds and built local access from scratch. I too waited a long time. Years actually. Finally came.
Dish started with the largest markets and worked downward. Is your market considered small?
From what I understand there is no set price for acquiring local access. And it is not a package. Each has its own ideas of what it thinks its worth. So maybe the local station is asking an unreasonable price. Maybe all the technical requirements are not worked out from the local station's end. OP, did you contact your local ABC affiliate and ask them what the holdup is? Also doesn't Dish also have to get rebroadcast rights from ABC,CBS,NBC,etc?
So if you really want to know what is going on you really need to dig deeper. The mantra of its Dish's fault for everything is kinda weak. No I don't work for Dish. No I am not saying everything Dish does is good, I have many complaints in the last couple of years. But I realistically don't expect Dish to jump through hoops for me an individual subscriber.
Lastly, since I became a Dish customer Charlie has lived up to what he told his customers back then. He wanted to make Dish the best value for your money and he was not going to just pay station providers whatever they wanted and pass the cost on to us the subscribers. He negotiated the best deal he could and year after year made minimal increases to a subscribers bill. That is something cable could not do nor will they ever do.