An interesting read recently appeared in GeekWire. The article takes a close look at how the City of Seattle WA coped with 4 days of severe snow and is a fine lesson to other local government agencies on what they can do in response, particularly with location data, mapping, and other technology.
Of particular interest in the article was the list of web mapping resources, emergency services, and data sharing repositories that the City has in place. Some of the resources that proved valuable in during the snow included:
In the article though, the author addressed areas that could be done better and there's some fine considerations here, again things that any city agency could consider:
GPS enable all government owned vehicles
Better video conferencing tools for government officials (and translators on hand if needed)
GPS enable all buses and water taxis
High speed fibre broadband network
Better crowd-sourcing of citizen reporting (social media perhaps)
System for locals to sign up and receive alerts and notices
See more 
