Is it normal behavior for local planners to ignore static obstacles if no pointcloud or laserscan data is being published?

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This is not related to the local planners directly but to the local costmap setup (costmap_2d). Local planners in the navigation stack have only access to the local costmap, so you need to add the desired layer to the configuration.

Based on the Robot Setup and Configure and run Robot Navigation Tutorial you might try the following:

E.g. in local_costmap_params.yaml (or similar):

  rolling_window: true
  width: 5.0
  height: 5.0
  resolution: 0.1

  plugins:
   ## Without proximity sensors, we do not need any obstacle_layer:
   # - {name: obstacle_layer,      type: "costmap_2d::VoxelLayer"}

   ## Static Layer
   - {name: static_layer,            type: "costmap_2d::StaticLayer"}

   # Uncomment the following line if you want to inflate occupied cells 
   #- {name: inflation_layer,     type: "costmap_2d::InflationLayer"}

Note, you might add more configurations for layers (inflation_layer and static_layer) either here or in the costmap_common_params.yaml. Please check the costmap_2d documentation (static_map topic name, service, ...).

Notice, there was an issue early 2015 (see here) but it seems to be fixed according to the related merge requests on github. If it still does not work,