The city line Sunset
Four authorities were asked the same question about the same ground and all four said Sunset
The city limits are drawn inside the base.
Roughly 255 acres of Hill Air Force Base is legally inside Sunset, which is about a quarter of a city of 1.47 square miles. The state boundary layer, the Census Bureau's geocoder, the 2020 block file and the county's own parcel roll all agree, and so does the general plan Sunset's council adopted on 15 November 2022, which describes a strip on the east currently being controlled by the United States Air Force. This is the line, the record behind it, and the standing 2002 policy that sits at the end of it.
Sunset sits at the top of Davis County, a long drive north of the Southern Utah ground I actually work, so these pages are researched rather than lived. What is on them was read where it is issued: the city's own website and the general plan its council adopted, published on the state public notice website; the North Davis Fire District and the North Davis Sewer District; the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll; the Census Bureau's geocoder and its 2020 block file; and the state's own roads and municipal boundary layers. Every figure carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent takes the ground level work.
The live question
Does Sunset sit beside Hill Air Force Base, or does it contain a piece of it?
It contains a piece of it, and four independent authorities agree, all checked on 16 August 2026. The state's authoritative roads layer returns 333 road segments inside Sunset, and 51 of them carry a ZIP code of 84056 and a postal community of HILL AFB. Their names are not the numbered streets of the rest of the city: Administrative Loop, Arizona Drive, Arkansas Drive, Arsenal Road, Aspen Avenue, Browning Street, California Drive, Cedar Lane, Colorado Drive, Connecticut Drive, Delaware Drive, Georgia Street, Maine Street, Service Way, Utility Drive and Wardleigh Road among them.
The state's municipal boundary layer, given a coordinate on Arsenal Road, on Browning Street and on Maine Street, returns Sunset at all three. The Census Bureau's geocoder, given the same kind of coordinate, returns an incorporated place of Sunset city and puts the ground in Census Tract 9800, which is the tract number the Bureau reserves for special land use areas such as military installations. And the Davis County Assessor's parcel roll, which carries 2,420 parcels for the residential city, returns nothing at all at three of the four points tested out there.
So the boundary is not drawn along the edge of the installation. It is drawn inside it. Fourteen 2020 census blocks from that special tract have their interior points inside the Sunset polygon and they total about 255 acres, which is roughly a quarter of a city of about 1.47 square miles. The installation itself continues east for miles beyond the line and is not this page's subject at any point; what it is, what it flies, what it employs, how its entrances work and what its published noise contours mean for a house are all on the county page.
The east side, in numbers
255 acres
roughly, inside the municipal line
about 1/4
of the whole city, on the block measurement
9800
the census tract number that ground falls in
84056
the ZIP code on 51 of the city's 333 road segments
The record
Four authorities, one question, and the only interesting disagreement is on the tax roll.
Each row below is a separate body answering the same question about the same ground: which city is this, and what is recorded here. All four were queried on 16 August 2026, at coordinates on named streets east of the freeway rather than at an address, because an address search on this ground returns nothing useful.
| The authority | What it was asked | What it returned | Why that answer matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| The state roads layer | Every road segment whose left or right municipality is Sunset | 333 segments. 282 carry ZIP 84015 with a postal community of Clearfield; 51 carry ZIP 84056 with a postal community of HILL AFB | One small city is split across two ZIP codes and owns neither of them. The 51 are the strip |
| The state municipal boundary layer | Point in polygon at coordinates on Arsenal Road, Browning Street and Maine Street | Sunset at all three, county number 06, which is Davis | The state's own boundary answer for named base streets is the same answer it gives for a numbered street on the west side |
| The Census Bureau geocoder | The geographies at a coordinate on Arsenal Road | Incorporated place: Sunset city. Census Tract 9800. A 2020 census block inside that tract | A 9800 series tract is the Bureau's code for a special land use area, so the federal statistical system has this ground inside the city too |
| The Davis County Assessor's parcel roll | Point in polygon at four coordinates on the same streets | Nothing at three of them. One parcel at the fourth: 48.1 acres at a Georgia Street address, city recorded as Sunset, property class recorded as unknown, no primary residence flagged | Federal ground is largely off a county tax roll, which is exactly what you would expect, and the single exception is recorded without being classified |
| The 2020 census block file | Every block in the Davis County special tract, tested against the Sunset polygon | Fourteen blocks with interior points inside the city, totalling about 255 acres of land, and 89 people and 13 housing units counted across all fourteen in 2020 | This is why a statistic computed for Sunset at tract or block level is describing two different geographies at once |
The block measurement counts a block whole if its interior point falls inside the city, so a block straddling the line is assigned entirely. The honest form of the result is roughly 255 acres, or about a quarter of the city, and not a precise acreage; anyone who needs a hard number has to clip the block geometry to the municipal polygon. Every query above was run on 16 August 2026 and every layer is updated on its own schedule.
The details
Getting there
There is no route to give, and that is the point of the entry. The practical way to see this boundary is on a screen: open the Davis County parcel viewer, run east from any Main Street address, and watch the parcels stop while the city name does not. From the street, the visible edge is the freeway, and the actual edge is about a fifth of a mile further on. Anyone whose business genuinely is on the installation should use the county topic, which covers how entry to it works.
Before you go
- The east strip is not a place to visit and this page is not sending you to one. It is a jurisdictional fact with consequences on paper rather than a destination.
- If a specific parcel matters to a transaction, take the answer from the Davis County Assessor rather than from a postal address, because the postal address here can say Clearfield or Hill AFB while the municipality says Sunset.
- Anything about entrances, hours, credentials, the flight line or noise belongs to the county topic and is not repeated on any page of this companion.
- The one parcel the county roll does carry out there is recorded with a property class of unknown, so do not read a use, a value or an intention into it.
The city's own words
Currently being controlled by is the verb the council put in its own plan, and it is the right one.
None of the dataset work above was necessary to establish the basic fact, because Sunset has published it about itself for years. Section 2.1 of the general plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022 opens: "Sunset City is a small community located at the north end of Davis County between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake. It is 1.31 square miles (1.9 miles by 0.5 miles approximately), with an additional 0.3 x 1.9 miles to the east that is currently being controlled by the United States Air Force."
Read that second sentence slowly, because the grammar is doing real work. The plan does not say the base borders the city. It describes an additional piece of the city, to the east, that the Air Force controls. "Currently being controlled by" is a statement about who has use of ground, not about who the ground belongs to on a boundary map, and it is exactly the honest verb for a situation where a municipal line and an installation fence do not sit on top of each other. A city government chose that phrasing and has kept it.
The numbers in the same sentence do not reconcile, and this page is not going to pretend they do. 1.9 by 0.5 is 0.95, not 1.31. The east strip at 0.3 by 1.9 is 0.57, and 1.31 plus 0.57 is 1.88, against a boundary polygon measured at about 1.47 square miles. What reconciles cleanly is the 1.31: it is exactly the Census land area figure for 2010 that the same plan carries in its own demographics table, so the plan is quoting a federal measurement and then sketching the shape by hand beside it. The measured strip is about a fifth of a mile wide rather than three tenths.
The publishable version is a range with each source named. The Census land area is 1.31 square miles. The state's boundary polygon measures about 1.47. The city's own plan describes a residential city of about 1.9 miles by half a mile with a further strip on the east under Air Force control. And the census blocks from the special tract that fall inside the city line come to roughly 255 acres. Those are four measurements of four slightly different things, and averaging them would produce a number that is nobody's.
An additional 0.3 by 1.9 miles to the east that is currently being controlled by the United States Air Force. That is the city describing a quarter of itself in its own adopted plan.
Two small things on that ground that are worth knowing and are not on any list
The federal geographic names record carries a populated place called Arsenal at about 4,596 feet, east of the freeway and inside the Sunset polygon, which matches Arsenal Road in the state roads layer. So there is a place called Arsenal inside the city limits of Sunset, and it is the highest ground the city has by a margin of about sixty feet over anything on the residential side.
The same record carries a locale called Smith Siding, at about 4,577 feet, on the rail and freeway alignment inside the city. A siding is a railroad artefact and the name suggests a stop or a spur that predates everything around it. No issuing body publishes anything about what it was or when it stopped being it, so it is named here as an unresolved thread rather than explained.
The policy
A city of one and a half square miles has a standing plan to annex the entire base if it ever closes.
Section 5.1 of the same adopted plan, verbatim: "In 2002, Sunset City Corporation adopted into its General Plan the annexation of the entirety of Hill Field Air Force Base, up to the current existing boundaries of Davis County to South Weber City, Roy City, Riverdale City, Layton City and Clearfield City in the event that Hill Field Air Force Base would be closed."
Take that apart and it is more interesting than it first sounds. It is not a wish, it is a policy adopted into a governing document. It is not vague about extent: the entirety, out to the county boundaries this city shares with five other cities. It was adopted in 2002, which places it squarely in the era when base closure rounds were a live subject for every community near an installation. And it survived a revision cycle that ended on 15 November 2022, so a council twenty years later read that clause and left it in.
The framing has to be exact, so here it is exactly. The clause is conditional. It operates only in the event of a closure. No closure of Hill Air Force Base has been announced, proposed, scheduled or reviewed, nothing on this page or anywhere on this companion should be read as suggesting otherwise, and the clause is not evidence of any of those things. What it is evidence of is a small city doing what small cities beside large federal holdings do, which is write down in advance what it would want if the ground ever came free. Announced is not built, and contingent is not even announced.
The plan's other annexation material is smaller and more ordinary. It says the city has identified a contiguous unincorporated area that could in future become part of Sunset, and points at a proposed annexation map. Two things about that are worth recording. The plan's own text sends the reader to Appendix C, and the document's only appendix is Appendix A. And the appendix that does exist describes what infrastructure the city already has in the proposed annexation area: the main trunk line of the sewer district along 1800 North, running east under Interstate 15, plus existing Sunset City water storage tanks and Weber Basin water lines on the same ground.
| What the plan actually says | What it does not say | How to read it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 2002 clause | That the city adopted the annexation of the entirety of the base into its general plan, in the event the base would be closed | That a closure is expected, proposed, likely or under review, at any point, in any wording | A contingency written into a planning document, and nothing more than that |
| The extent | Out to the existing Davis County boundaries this city shares with South Weber, Roy, Riverdale, Layton and Clearfield | That any of those five cities agrees, or that Sunset's claim would prevail over theirs | One city's adopted position. Four of those five have their own plans, and they are not examined here |
| The current strip | Nothing directly. The 255 acres inside the line is established by the boundary layer, the geocoder and the block file, not by section 5.1 | That the strip is a product of the 2002 policy. The boundary long predates it | Two separate facts that happen to point the same direction |
| The infrastructure | That the sewer district's main trunk line runs along 1800 North and east under Interstate 15, and that city water storage tanks and district water lines sit on the annexation ground | When any of it was built, what condition it is in, or who maintains it | The most concrete sentence in the whole annexation element, and the only one describing something that physically exists |
| The map | That proposed areas must be shown on the attached proposed annexation map, at Appendix C | Anything readable. The plan's appendix is lettered A, and its map pages carry no text layer | Ask the city for the map rather than inferring the boundary from the text |
Quotations are from the Sunset City General Plan as revised 15 November 2022, read as a PDF on the Utah Public Notice Website on 16 August 2026. A general plan is amended by ordinance, so confirm the current text at the city before relying on any clause in it.
Nothing on this page is a statement about the future of the installation, and no version of it should be repeated as one. The 2002 clause is conditional on an event that has not happened and is not proposed, and it has sat unchanged in an adopted planning document through at least one revision cycle. It is not a forecast, a warning, a risk assessment or a signal, and a page, a listing or an agent that turns it into one is inventing something the document does not contain. Nor is the 255 acres inside the city line a sign of anything changing: it is where the boundary has been drawn for decades, and it is described in the city's own plan in the present tense. If any of this bears on a decision, read the plan yourself at the city and ask the city recorder whether the annexation element has been amended since November 2022.
Living with it
What a boundary drawn inside a federal installation actually changes for a household on the other side of the freeway.
Day to day it changes very little, and that is worth saying first because the fact is startling enough to sound like it should change everything. A household on a numbered street west of the freeway lives on a grid, pays a city that runs its own police department, gets a bill for water and sewer and refuse from that same city, and never crosses the line described on this page. The eastern quarter of Sunset is not a neighborhood, an amenity or a hazard. It is ground the city has on paper and nobody drives into.
Where it does matter is in the paperwork, and there it matters in a specific and checkable way. A single small city here spans two ZIP codes, uses a third city's address system on 329 of its 333 road segments, has a quarter of its area off the county tax roll and is split between an ordinary residential census tract and a special land use tract. Any statistic you read about Sunset was computed on one of those geographies, and which one is almost never stated. That is the practical reason to know this: not because it changes a house, but because it changes what a number about this city means.
The second practical consequence is about the tax base rather than the household. A city that cannot levy on a quarter of its own area, and which has 94.5 per cent of the rest in residential use with commercial concentrated on one street, is running its budget off a narrow base by construction. That is not a criticism and it is not a prediction; it is arithmetic, and it is the background to every published fee on the city's utility page. The mover page works through the whole service list, provider by provider.
And the third is simply that the installation is somebody else's subject. Everything a household actually wants to know about living near a large active airfield, which entrance a given street uses, what the commute costs in minutes, what the flight line sounds like on a given day, what the published noise study says about a specific address, is written once for the whole county on the base page, at length and with its sources. This page carries the line on the map. That page carries everything on the other side of it.
The other side
Hill Air Force Base
What the installation is, what it flies and what it employs, held at county level instead of in fifteen places.
Read the guideThe seam itself
Main Street and the freeway
What the interstate did to the street it was built behind, in the city government's own words.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Sunset
Two ZIP codes, somebody else's street numbers, its own police force and a published rate card.
The mover pageThe other boundary
How Sunset got its name
The western city limit is a railroad, and it is the same line the town separated along in about 1916.
Read the guideThe practical side
The Sunset city guide
The half of an address that carries figures: what sells here, who bills you, what the drive runs to.
Open the guideThe wider county
Davis County on The Local
Fourteen other towns at this end of the state, and seven subjects none of them writes alone.
The region hubKeep reading
The rest of Sunset on The Local.
The street
Main Street and the freeway
The city wrote the destruction of the east side of Main Street into its own plan.
Read the guideThe name
How Sunset got its name
A bishop asked three women for a name in 1916. The railroad drew the line after.
Read the guideThe parks
The three parks
Three addresses, three boweries, and a whole day under the biggest one for $15.
Read the guideMoving here
Moving to Sunset
Its own police force, and a neighbor's ZIP code, fire engines and street numbers.
Read the guideThe companion
The whole of Sunset
A mile and a half of grid, a freeway down the seam, and a federal quarter nobody drives into.
Start at the hubQuick answers
The city line, answered.
Part of it is. The municipal boundary is drawn inside the installation rather than along its edge, so a strip of base ground east of Interstate 15 is legally in Sunset. Fourteen 2020 census blocks from the special land use tract the Census Bureau uses for military installations have their interior points inside the city polygon, and they total roughly 255 acres, which is about a quarter of a city of some 1.47 square miles. The installation itself continues east for miles beyond the line and is covered on the county page rather than here.
About a quarter of it, and the honest figure is roughly 255 acres rather than a precise acreage. The measurement counts whole 2020 census blocks whose interior points fall inside the city boundary, so a block straddling the line is assigned entirely to one side, and anyone who needs a hard number has to clip the block geometry to the municipal polygon. The strip runs the full 1.89 mile length of the city and is about a fifth of a mile wide, from a little east of the freeway out to the municipal line.
Section 2.1 of the plan the council adopted on 15 November 2022 says the city is 1.31 square miles, about 1.9 miles by 0.5 miles, with an additional 0.3 by 1.9 miles to the east that is currently being controlled by the United States Air Force. That is the city describing a piece of itself rather than describing a neighbor. The phrasing is worth keeping, because currently being controlled by is a statement about who has use of ground rather than about where a boundary runs, which is exactly the situation.
Because postal geography and municipal geography are separate systems and here they disagree. In the state's authoritative roads layer, 51 of the 333 road segments inside Sunset carry a ZIP code of 84056 and a postal community of HILL AFB, while the other 282 carry 84015 with a postal community of Clearfield. So a city of about 5,400 people spans two ZIP codes and owns neither. The named streets in the 84056 set include Arsenal Road, Browning Street, Maine Street, Georgia Street and Administrative Loop.
It is the tract the Census Bureau uses for special land use areas such as military installations, large airports and large parks, which typically carry little or no household population. Sunset is split between an ordinary residential tract and this one. Across the fourteen blocks of it that fall inside the city line, the 2020 census counted 89 people and 13 housing units. The practical consequence is that a statistic published for Sunset at tract or block level may be describing two very different geographies at once without saying which.
Almost none of them. The county's parcel layer carries 2,420 parcels for Sunset, and probes at four coordinates on named streets east of the freeway returned nothing at three of them. The fourth returned a single parcel of 48.1 acres at a Georgia Street address, with the city recorded as Sunset, the property class recorded as unknown and no primary residence flagged. Federal installation ground is normally off a county tax roll, so the empty result is the expected one and the single exception is recorded without being classified.
It did, conditionally, and the clause is still in the current plan. Section 5.1 says that in 2002 Sunset City Corporation adopted into its general plan the annexation of the entirety of Hill Field Air Force Base, out to the existing Davis County boundaries it shares with South Weber, Roy, Riverdale, Layton and Clearfield, in the event that the base would be closed. It is a land use contingency in a planning document. No closure has been announced, proposed, scheduled or reviewed, and nothing here should be read as suggesting one.
No. There is no public access from the Sunset side, no visitor route, no public road across the line and nothing out there for a reader of this page to look at. The practical way to see this boundary is on a screen rather than from a car: open the Davis County parcel viewer, run east from any Main Street address, and watch the parcels stop while the city name carries on. Anyone whose business genuinely is on the installation should use the county page, which covers how entry to it works.
Two small things, both from the federal geographic names record. There is a populated place called Arsenal on that ground at about 4,596 feet, which matches Arsenal Road in the state roads layer and is the highest ground in Sunset by roughly sixty feet over anything on the residential side. And there is a locale called Smith Siding at about 4,577 feet on the rail and freeway alignment inside the city. A siding is a railroad artefact, and no issuing body publishes anything about what it was or when it stopped being it.
A quarter of a city that nobody who lives there has ever driven into.
This is the single most unusual fact about Sunset and it changes almost nothing about a house on a numbered street, which is exactly why it is worth knowing before somebody tells you a version of it that does change something. The boundary is decades old, the city has published it about itself for years, and the 2002 clause at the end of it is a contingency written into a planning document rather than a signal about anything. What it genuinely does affect is what a number about this city means. If you are weighing an address here, tell me which streets, and I will introduce you to a Davis County partner agent who can pull the parcel record with you.
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.