At least in the United States, pretty much all geographic information - at the local, state and federal levels - is now being remeasured and stored in GIS formats. I can say first-hand that governments and government contractors are constantly needing programmers that can talk to ArcGIS and properly visualize that information. This is true for any agency that needs to deal with official definitions of geography when calculating their statistics - I've seen law enforcement agencies, transportation agencies and housing agencies all need GIS applications developed, to name a few. And probably some sexier TLA agencies in Washington, although my experience with GIS for transportation didn't give me much exposure for those fields.
The nice thing about this sort of career is that you can do it in a wide variety of cities and states. Your girlfriend is moving to Florida? You can work for the state transportation department in Tallahassee. Oh, she's in Miami you say? Miami's almost certainly a big enough city to be creating its own municipal GIS data and needing programmers to work with it.