The question is talking about local maxima of an integer-valued function over the elements of a Cayley graph. The function has no local minima, except for the global minimum at the node representing the solved state.
I'll note that there can be two types of local maxima. For a "weak" local maxima, neighboring nodes can have the same distance value as the local maximum node. For a "strong" local maxima, all neighboring nodes have a distance value less than the local maximum node.
Unfortunately, susan12's pasting of the text lost the subscripts in the original version.