If city hall floods or loses power for a week, how do we keep utility billing and payroll running?

Start from the right question. Not what our IT recovery plan says, but what your organization has to be able to do within 72 hours of losing the building. For most small governments the honest list is short: make payroll, bill and collect utilities, pay vendors, and communicate with residents and with each other. Everything else can wait a week.

What makes that list survivable:

• Cloud first, for exactly this reason. If email, files and finance run in Microsoft 365 or a hosted system, your staff work from home, from the fire station, or from a relative's house in Georgia, with a laptop and a phone hotspot. What hurts in a storm is what lives on a server in the building. That is the single biggest lever and it is worth moving before the next season rather than after.
• Backups that are not in the building. Obvious, and we still find the backup drive sitting next to the server it protects.
• Honest expectations about power. A UPS buys you minutes to shut down cleanly. It does not keep you running. If something genuinely has to stay up, that is a generator with a transfer switch and a fuel plan, and it is a capital conversation, not an IT one.
• Phones that do not depend on the building. A hosted phone system can reroute to cell phones in minutes. A system in the closet at city hall cannot.
• Printed contact sheets and a paper copy of the plan. Your directory, your vendor numbers and your plan are all in the system that is down. Print them. Staff should have one at home.

Two other things specific to public sector. FEMA and state reimbursement depends on records, so the records that document your response and your costs need to survive along with everything else, and that is worth saying out loud during planning. And your own continuity of operations plan probably already names the alternate site and the essential functions. We would rather build to your existing plan than write a separate IT one that contradicts it.

We do a pre-season check every year before June 1: verify restores, confirm the remote access works for the people who will need it, walk through the recovery order, and check that the paper copies are current. It takes a morning and it is the cheapest insurance on this list.