Lawmakers Hear Request to Expand Utah Cyber Center Support for Local Governments and Schools
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Summary
Representatives and local officials urged funding for the Utah Cyber Center to expand training, incident response and equipment grants for counties, cities, water districts and K–12 schools, citing recent successful ransomware interruptions and a looming end to federal grant support.
Representatives Albrecht and Senator Harper asked the General Government Appropriations Subcommittee to fund an expanded Utah Cyber Center program that would deliver training, equipment and grants to local governments and K–12 school districts.
"We just need to get this money into place so we can get grants, training, and other resources out to people," Representative Albrecht said, describing a particular need in rural Utah. Lee Perry, Box Elder County commissioner and former state legislator, told the committee Box Elder recovered from a major cybersecurity incident with help from the cyber center: "Because we worked with the cyber center ... we were able to get back up and running within two weeks." Phil Bates, the state’s chief information security officer and director of the cyber center, said the center has intercepted advanced ransomware attempts and now blocks threats across a statewide platform: "Since we started this program ... we have not had a successful attack in any of these; we’ve been able to detect them prior to them being successful and catch them in the middle of it."
Sponsors described the request as two-part: funding to strengthen local government protection and an allocation for K–12 cybersecurity. They said federal grant funding that previously supported the program is expiring and local entities lack staff and budget to respond to sophisticated attacks. Joshua Errig, chair of the Utah Local Government IT Leaders Association, said local partners rely on the center and urged the committee not to let the program lapse.
The presenters asked the committee to prioritize the RFA so training and prevention services can continue; no formal vote on the RFA was recorded during the hearing. Committee members pressed staff on prioritization and noted the cyber center’s role in preventing cascading impacts across jurisdictions. The committee recessed to continue other agenda items and scheduled further consideration of RFAs at the stated RFA hearing time.
The committee heard multiple firsthand accounts of attacks and interceptions but did not enact new policy during the session; the RFA remains under consideration. The presenters said continued state funding would allow the cyber center to distribute grants, support software and monitoring for local networks, and sustain training to reduce the need for costly incident response.