Why no /usr/local/etc in Debian?

[David Bruce <dbruce@tampabay.rr.com>]

I am the fledgling upstream maintainer of Bill Kendrick's game "Tux, Of Math 
Command" aka Tuxmath.  I have been working on making the program more 
configurable, and it now reads and writes config files.  The generic 
(non-Debianized) "make install" target puts the program under /usr/local.  
From my reading of the FHS, /usr/local should have its own etc for 
configuration of locally-installed software.  My /usr/local (Sid) has all of 
the other subdirectories listed in the FHS, but no /usr/local/etc.

1.  Would it be impolite for the makefile for my program to simply go ahead 
and create /usr/local/etc?
2.  Shouldn't Debian systems already have this directory to be FHS-compliant?
-- 
David Bruce