This is a very nice idea, as I think local boards are the core of this forum.
Of course, it would be very difficult to have meaningful voting, as every local board is a different island, and of course, we want to prevent the local hero merit source from winning the competition.
Could easily be done with the permission of Icopress & co to elect certain prominent users of the local sections. There will be less work to do since there won't be as many users voting, and at least you'll get more tightly knitted users voting for their stand out users each year. Plus, you could potentially narrow down some of the categories to make it better fit. That way, they could vote on their local community awards, and the main one without too many issues.