Moving here North Salt Lake
A working seam that is two years older than the city beside it
The refinery corridor, and what it asks of a household.
Exactly one refinery has a North Salt Lake address and it was commissioned in 1948, two years after the town incorporated. Four more sit nearby in three other cities, and one of them carries the name of a fourth. Here is the geography stated plainly, the state permit record that makes it checkable, the alarm test that is not a public warning, the three gravel pits, the road and transit grid, and the ordinary municipal first month that comes with all of it.
Southern Utah is my home turf. North Salt Lake is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: the facts come from the city, the Utah Geological Survey, the state air quality record and the operators themselves, and each one carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent does the on the ground work here.
Where this sits
A working seam with a city built up the hill behind it.
Most relocation writing about this place either leads with the refineries or hides them. Neither is useful. What is useful is knowing precisely what is here, where the city line falls, what the regulator publishes about it, who to ring when something smells, and what an ordinary first month costs and asks. That is the whole of this page.
The seam runs north to south along the flats where Interstate 15, US-89 and the rail lines converge, and it has been employment ground since before North Salt Lake was a municipality. The refinery on Center Street was commissioned in 1948; the town incorporated in 1946. The stockyards went in near the tracks in 1895 and a meat packing plant took a building on Center Street in 1916, which is how the street the city hall now stands on came to be called Cudahy Lane for a while. Industry did not arrive next to a suburb here. The suburb grew up the hill behind an industry that was already working.
The second thing to hold is the county line. The entire southern boundary of this city is Salt Lake City, which is why the corridor does not stop at the edge of the map and why two of the five refineries people associate with this place are in another county. It is also why the commute is short: the city's own published figure for the drive to downtown Salt Lake City is 7.6 miles and ten minutes, which beats most of Salt Lake County's own suburbs.
And the third is that this is a small city with a full set of municipal machinery. It runs its own police department out of City Hall, its own justice court, its own water and its own golf course, contracts fire to a five city agency, and buys into a five city recreation district. Most of the first month of living here is a matter of finding out which of those bodies handles what, and almost none of it is written down in one place. It is below.
The mover's numbers
1948
the year the refinery inside the city line was commissioned
7.6 miles
to downtown Salt Lake City, the city's own figure
4
parallel corridors run the length of the city, plus the belt route
0
public audio warnings from any plant on this seam
The live question
How many refineries are in North Salt Lake, and where are the rest of them actually?
One. Big West Oil at 333 West Center Street is the only refinery with a North Salt Lake address, and that is not a guess: the Utah Division of Air Quality lists both the mailing and the physical address as 333 West Center Street in its intent to approve issued on 4 December 2025, along with the site's map coordinates and its petroleum refining industrial code. Checked 15 August 2026.
The other four are in three other cities and the naming is what confuses everybody. HF Sinclair's plant is called the Woods Cross refinery and is physically at 1070 West 500 South in West Bountiful, on a site the operator gives as about 200 acres. Silver Eagle Refining genuinely is in Woods Cross. Marathon and Chevron are both across the south line in Salt Lake City. So five refineries, four cities, and only one of them belongs to this one.
Silver Eagle is worth a sentence of its own because it is the odd one in the group. Its own site describes an active refinery with an atmospheric crude distillation unit, a vacuum distillation unit and a distillate dewaxing unit, running yellow wax crude exclusively, a Uinta Basin crude that most refineries cannot process, and producing diesel, gasoline blendstock and other products. The plant was built in 1954 as a wax refinery, bought by Silver Eagle in 2000 and acquired by an international group in 2011. It publishes no capacity figure.
| Refinery | The city it is actually in | Capacity | Where that comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marathon Salt Lake City | Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County | 70,000 barrels per calendar day | Marathon's own operations page, which also dates the start of operations to 1908 and calls it the largest refinery in Utah |
| Chevron Salt Lake | Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County | About 55,000 barrels a day | Widely published; no Chevron primary page stating it was opened for this check |
| HF Sinclair Woods Cross | West Bountiful, Davis County | 45,000 barrels a day | HF Sinclair's own facilities page, which gives the address as 1070 West 500 South, West Bountiful |
| Big West Oil | North Salt Lake, Davis County | About 33,000 barrels a day per the state permit, 36,000 per the company | Utah Division of Air Quality intent to approve of 4 December 2025, and bigwestoil.com |
| Silver Eagle Refining | Woods Cross, Davis County | Not published | The company's own site, which describes an active plant running yellow wax crude exclusively |
Locations and capacities as published by each operator and, for Big West Oil, by the Utah Division of Air Quality in its intent to approve of 4 December 2025, all checked 15 August 2026. No parcel level check was made at the Davis County viewer for any of the five, so every placement rests on the operator's or the regulator's own published address. That is strong for Big West, where the permit carries a physical address and map coordinates, and weakest for Silver Eagle, which publishes no street number at all.
The record
The most useful thing about this corridor is that a regulator writes it all down.
Big West Oil describes itself as a complex medium conversion refinery, founded in 1985 as a family owned company and a subsidiary of the successor to a well known truck stop group. It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, on a blend of regional crude from Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, and its published headcount is approximately 275 workers across the Salt Lake Valley and the Uinta Basin rather than at this plant alone. It partners with a United Steel Workers local. Its main products are gasoline and diesel, alongside fuel oil, propane, isobutane, gas oil, naphtha and elemental sulfur.
The state permit is where the detail lives. It lists the plant as a Title V major source located in the Northern Wasatch Front ozone nonattainment area and the Salt Lake City fine particulate nonattainment area, and it names every processing unit: atmospheric crude distillation, distillate dewaxing, distillate hydrodesulfurisation, catalytic cracking, alkylation, naphtha hydrodesulfurisation, naphtha isomerisation, naphtha reforming, a saturates distillation gas plant, butane isomerisation, an amine absorber and a sulfur recovery unit, plus truck and rail loading racks, cooling towers, a wastewater treatment plant and two flares named west and south. Those two flares are the thing visible from the freeway, and now you know what they are called.
The December 2025 action itself was a modest one: adding rail to truck transloading at the railcar loading facility, controlled by a vapour combustion unit, with modified inlet piping and some additional unpaved road traffic. It ran a 30 day public comment period with notice published in two Salt Lake newspapers on 7 December 2025, and the construction clock in the permit runs 18 months from the date of a final approval order. Whether that final order has since been issued, and on what date, was not verified for this page. The permitting portal carries the document and it is searchable by anybody.
The emissions figures in that permit are potential to emit, not measured emissions, and reading them as what the plant actually releases would be materially wrong. Permits carry a source wide potential to emit, which is the ceiling a facility is allowed to operate under, calculated rather than measured. For this plant that calculated ceiling includes figures on the order of 450 tons a year of carbon monoxide, 434 tons of volatile organic compounds, 195 tons of nitrogen oxides and 140 tons of sulfur dioxide, and every one of those is a permitted maximum rather than a reading from a stack. The permit also imposes a source wide daily nitrogen oxide cap computed midnight to midnight. What this page will not do is turn any of that into a statement about health, in either direction. The numbers are public, dated and searchable, the state publishes current air conditions at air.utah.gov, and the Davis County Health Department and the federal regional office were both copied on the permit.
The noise and the smell
If you hear an alarm at noon on a Friday, it is not for you.
This is the single most useful thing the city publishes about living beside a refinery and almost nobody repeats it. In its own words: local refineries hold regular alarm tests for their on site workers, the plant to the north tests theirs on Fridays at noon, and there are no audio warnings used for the public. The city's recommendation is to sign up for the county emergency notification service, which is the channel that would actually reach a household, alongside the city's own alert signup.
One naming note attached to that. The city's text was written when the plant to the north was still branded Holly, and it is now HF Sinclair following the 2022 merger. The company name has changed, the noon test is worth confirming rather than assuming a decade of continuity, and the underlying point stands regardless: a refinery siren is a workplace drill, not a public alarm.
On smell, the honest version is that odour days happen, they are episodic and wind dependent, and the bench notices them far less than the flats do. The homework is unglamorous and it works. Drive the specific street you are considering on a grey winter weekday rather than a blue Saturday, at a couple of different hours. Note where the parcel sits relative to the corridor and the prevailing wind. Look at the state's own monitoring record for the months you care about rather than at anybody's summary of it, including this one. Then decide.
And know who to ring. The Davis County Health Department is copied on the state's permits for this plant and is the local route for an air complaint, alongside the state environmental quality division. Neither of them is a real estate agent, which is the point: this is a question with a public authority attached to it and there is no reason to take an opinion when you can take a record.
The pits, which are a separate thing entirely
The quarries along the corridor are run by Lakeview Rock Products, founded in 1980, with three pits at North Salt Lake addresses: a north pit at 1075 South Highway 89, an upper pit at 2390 Beck Street and a lower pit and asphalt plant at 2380 Beck Street, with a corporate office at 900 North Redwood Road. The company states a dust control practice of water, paving and street sweeping and a working relationship with the state air division. Two larger names commonly guessed for this ground are elsewhere: one operates a Beck Street quarry listed in Salt Lake City and the other's pit operations are out in Tooele County. Beck Street is the boundary street here and the pits sit on both sides of the county line, so nobody should assign a pit to a city without checking the address. Current mining permits, reclamation status and any expansion applications sit with the state division of oil, gas and mining and were not checked for this page.
There are no audio warnings used for the public. Nine words from a city, and they answer a question every arriving household has.
Getting out
Four parallel roads mean one bad wreck does not own the morning.
Four corridors run the length of this city and the belt route ties in at the south end: the freeway through the west centre, US-89 as Main Street continuing south into Beck Street, the Legacy Parkway on the flats and Redwood Road west of it. That redundancy is the strongest single argument for the address and it is a genuine one. The parkway itself is a four lane controlled access road of about 11.5 miles that opened on 13 September 2008 and runs from the belt route in north western Salt Lake City up to the Wasatch Weave in Farmington, with its southern end effectively at this city's doorstep.
Two things about the parkway have changed and both get reported wrong. Its original truck restriction lapsed on 1 January 2020 when the sunset in the 2005 settlement took effect, and at the same time the speed limit rose from 55 to 65. The threshold that had applied was five or more axles or 80,000 pounds gross weight, which is the detail that keeps the sentence from being repeated as a general lorry ban. And UDOT has been adding one lane in each direction, built inside the existing grassy median, from the belt route in North Salt Lake up toward Farmington, to meet demand projected to 2050. Construction started as early as 23 March 2026 with a target of wrapping by the end of the year and work hours of seven to five on weekdays. UDOT publishes nothing about closures on the adjacent trail, so nobody should tell you the trail is unaffected, and the project page is the thing to read before planning a ride.
On transit, the honest position is that the road grid is excellent and the rail is next door. There is no station inside the city and the nearest is in the neighbouring city, which the Foxboro page covers along with the bus routes. What is coming is a bus rapid transit line: 26 miles from the Farmington commuter rail station to Research Park in Salt Lake City, serving Farmington, Bountiful, Centerville, North Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, with 18 battery electric buses, no dedicated lanes, service every 15 minutes through the day and every 30 early and late, 20 new stations with 37 platforms alongside 19 existing stations with 39 platforms, and an estimated cost of 72 million dollars. It is approaching final design and there is no published opening year, so it belongs on a watch list rather than in a plan.
The last piece of geography is the county line at the bottom of the map, and this page deliberately stops at it. Downtown Salt Lake City is a subject with its own page, and so are the river corridor and the foothill country on the far side of the boundary. The downtown page carries what is actually there. This one carries how long it takes to get to it, which the city puts at 7.6 miles and ten minutes from its own doorstep.
The first month
Which body handles what, which is the thing nobody writes down.
None of this is glamorous and all of it comes up in the first four weeks. Every figure below is from the city's own New Resident information, which is December 2022 vintage unless a later date is given, so treat the prices as the shape of the thing and confirm the current number with the city.
Bins, water and the yard
- Garbage was 15.87 dollars a month per can and recycling 6.26 dollars a month per container, and the city notes a recycling container is cheaper than a second garbage can
- A storm drain fee of 7 dollars a month began on 1 January 2024
- Extra rubbish collection runs on the second Saturday of each month from May through November, included in the rate, with containers out on the Friday night and no loose piles
- Spring and autumn clean up drop offs run at the public works building at 642 North 400 West, twice a year, with proof of residency
- From 2026 the city added Memorial Day and Labor Day to the holidays that delay collection by a day for that week
Who to ring
- Fire, ambulance, paramedic, hazardous materials and technical rescue come from the South Davis Metro Fire Agency, a five city body rather than a city department
- The North Salt Lake Police Department is at City Hall, 10 East Center Street, with its own non emergency line, a separate dispatch number and a tip line
- The city runs its own justice court for traffic citations, minor criminal matters and small claims
- Household waste goes through the Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District; the Davis landfill is in Layton and the Bountiful landfill accepts green waste only
- Pet licensing is handled by Davis County Animal Control rather than by the city
Worth knowing early
- North Salt Lake belongs to the South Davis Recreation District alongside four neighbouring cities, so residents get the resident rate at the shared recreation centre
- Properties annexed with Val Verda kept their existing water supplier, so an address there may be on a different utility from one three streets away
- City Hall runs a four day week, Monday to Thursday, seven in the morning to half past five
- The City Council meets on the first and third Tuesday, with a work session at six and the regular session at seven
- The city runs a community garden at Center Street and Orchard Drive, with applications opening on the website each March
Val Verda, and why the spelling matters
Val Verda was platted in 1915 by a developer who bought 200 acres in south Davis County and named it from an approximation of the Spanish for green valley. It spent more than a century as unincorporated county ground surrounded by incorporated cities. The Davis County Commission voted on 27 September 2022 to recommend that North Salt Lake annex it, the City Council adopted a resolution of intent on 4 October 2022, a neighbourhood meeting followed on 5 October and a council public hearing on 15 November. The city publishes no effective date, acreage or annexed population for it, so none is printed here. One oddity to carry: the city's own Demographics page spells it Val Verde while its annexation page and the 1915 plat spell it Val Verda. The plat wins.
Living with it
A short commute, a working seam and a set of questions with public answers.
The trade this city offers is legible once you lay it out. You get the closest Davis County address to the capital, four parallel ways south, a bench with four trail doors on it and a municipality that publishes a surprising amount about itself. You accept a working industrial seam on the flats, a winter pattern that puts the floor of the valley under a layer the bench often sits above, and a purchase that asks more paperwork on the hill than on the flats.
What makes it manageable is that almost every question here has a public authority behind it. Air conditions come from the state. Permits come from the state division and are copied to the county health department. Landslide monitoring comes from the geological survey and it publishes telephone numbers. Trail plans come from a city committee whose minutes are on the public notice website. Population comes from three named bodies that disagree in traceable ways. There is very little here that has to be taken on somebody's word, which is unusual and worth using.
The one honest caution is about age. A lot of what the city publishes is a few years old, including the fee schedule quoted above and a parks brochure whose file name says 2019, and a few things it publishes are contradicted by the operators themselves. Read anything that costs money or promises an amenity at the source, in the year you are in, and be a little suspicious of any summary of this city that has no dates on it at all.
What this page hands to somebody else
- Prices, taxes, providers and the market. Those belong on the practical city guide, which carries the figures per source with their vintages attached.
- A head to head with a neighbouring city. No comparison page for North Salt Lake exists on this site yet, and when one is written it will sit on the comparisons index alongside the pairings already done across the state.
- Downtown Salt Lake City, the river corridor and the foothill country over the county line. All of that is Salt Lake County's, starting at the downtown page.
- The plant across the line in the next city but one. It carries a Woods Cross name and a West Bountiful address, and it belongs to the West Bountiful companion by geography rather than to this one by association.
- Anything about who lives near the corridor. The seam is a place and an air quality subject, and describing the households on either side of it is not something this companion does anywhere.
The money half
The North Salt Lake city guide
Prices per source with their dates, the tax picture and the ladder from west side townhome to bench view lot.
Open the guideTwo towns at once
The comparisons index
No head to head exists for this city yet. The index carries every pairing written across Utah so far.
Open the indexThe other flats
Foxboro
The residential half of the west side, its eleven parks, the wetland trail and the two county trail doors.
Read the guideThree county subjects belong on a mover's list here, and none of them is written by this city. A household weighing this address will want the county trail as a commuting option rather than a weekend one, the mountain front behind the bench as a set rather than as four trailheads, and the county wide picture of what a paid day out costs and when it is open. All three are written once for the fifteen Davis cities: the paved trail, the canyons and the family weekends page. The rest of the county sits on the Davis County hub.
Keep reading
More of North Salt Lake on The Local.
The slow one
Springhill Geologic Park
Eighteen homes over fifteen years, a buyout in 2012, and a park on the failure surface.
Read the guideThe sudden one
Parkway Drive, 2014
Six in the morning on 5 August 2014, on a mined slope that had been signed off.
Read the guideThe trail door
Tunnel Springs Park
The city's own door onto the shoreline trail, and a network its committee calls broken.
Read the guideThe bench
Eaglewood
A municipal eighteen on the hill, a fireworks line drawn through the middle of a city.
Read the guideThe west flats
Foxboro
Eleven named parks on the flats, 8,208 feet of wetland trail, and no station of its own.
Read the guideThe companion
North Salt Lake, in full
Two landslides, a bench trail door, a west side of eleven parks and one plant inside the line.
Read the pageQuick answers
Moving here, answered.
One. Big West Oil at 333 West Center Street is the only refinery with a North Salt Lake address, and the Utah Division of Air Quality lists both the mailing and the physical address there in its intent to approve issued on 4 December 2025, alongside the site's map coordinates and its petroleum refining industrial code. Four more sit nearby: HF Sinclair's plant, which is named for Woods Cross, is physically in West Bountiful; Silver Eagle Refining is in Woods Cross; and Marathon and Chevron are across the south line in Salt Lake City.
The regulator and the company give different figures and both are worth carrying. The Utah Division of Air Quality's permit of 4 December 2025 states that the nominal capacity of the refinery is approximately 33,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and Big West Oil's own website says a daily processing capacity of 36,000 barrels. The company describes itself as a complex medium conversion refinery, running 24 hours a day and 365 days a year on a blend of regional crude from Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, with approximately 275 workers across the Salt Lake Valley and the Uinta Basin.
A workplace drill. The city states it plainly: local refineries hold regular alarm tests for their on site workers, the plant to the north tests theirs on Fridays at noon, and there are no audio warnings used for the public. The city's own recommendation is to sign up for the county emergency notification service, which is the channel that would actually reach a household in a genuine emergency, alongside the city's own alert signup. The company name in the city's text predates the 2022 merger, so the operator is now HF Sinclair.
That is a question with a public authority attached to it, and this page gives you the authority rather than an opinion. The refinery inside the city is permitted as a Title V major source located in the Northern Wasatch Front ozone nonattainment area and the Salt Lake City fine particulate nonattainment area. Emissions figures printed in a permit are potential to emit, meaning a calculated ceiling rather than a measurement. The state publishes current conditions and monitoring data at air.utah.gov, and the Davis County Health Department and the federal regional office are both copied on the plant's permits.
Odour days happen, they are episodic and wind dependent, and the bench notices them considerably less than the flats do. The useful homework is unglamorous. Drive the specific street you are considering on a grey winter weekday rather than a blue Saturday, at more than one hour of the day. Note where the parcel sits relative to the corridor and the prevailing wind. Read the state's own monitoring record for the months you care about rather than anybody's summary of it. The local route for an air complaint is the Davis County Health Department alongside the state environmental quality division.
Lakeview Rock Products, founded in 1980, with three pits at North Salt Lake addresses: a north pit at 1075 South Highway 89, an upper pit at 2390 Beck Street and a lower pit and asphalt plant at 2380 Beck Street, plus a corporate office at 900 North Redwood Road. The company states a dust control practice of water, paving and street sweeping. Two larger names commonly assumed for this ground are elsewhere, one at a Beck Street quarry listed in Salt Lake City and the other out in Tooele County, and Beck Street itself straddles the county line.
The city's own published figure is 7.6 miles and ten minutes, and naming the source matters because the practical city guide on this site gives 8 to 10 miles and 12 to 18 minutes. Both are defensible in a city about 8.5 square miles across two elevations, so the honest form names the endpoints. Four parallel corridors run the length of the city, the freeway, US-89 as Main Street continuing into Beck Street, the Legacy Parkway and Redwood Road, with the belt route tying in at the south end, which means one incident rarely owns the whole morning.
Yes. UDOT has been adding one lane in each direction, built inside the existing grassy median, running from the belt route in North Salt Lake up toward Farmington, to meet travel demand projected to 2050. Construction started as early as 23 March 2026 with a target of wrapping by the end of the year and work hours of seven to five on weekdays. Two related facts get printed wrong: the parkway's original truck restriction lapsed on 1 January 2020 when a settlement sunset took effect, and the threshold had been five or more axles or 80,000 pounds gross weight.
A line is in design and there is no published opening year, which is exactly the distinction worth holding. UTA's Davis to Salt Lake connector is planned as 26 miles from the Farmington commuter rail station to Research Park in Salt Lake City, serving Farmington, Bountiful, Centerville, North Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, using 18 battery electric buses with no dedicated lanes, running every 15 minutes through the day and every 30 early and late, with 20 new stations and an estimated cost of 72 million dollars. It is approaching final design. Announced is not built.
A working seam, a short commute and a set of questions with public answers.
The corridor is the thing everybody notices from the freeway and it is rarely the thing that decides a purchase here. What decides it is which street a house is on, which side of the wind it sits, whether a parcel falls inside the mapped hazard areas on the hill, which water utility serves an annexed address and how the drive behaves at the hour you would really make it. Send me the streets you are weighing and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works this end of the county, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.