This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Utah’s 29 counties each offer businesses and employees something different. Named the best state in the nation two years in a row, it’s Utah’s varied counties that provide opportunities for all. Let’s visit Davis County.
With water to the west and mountains to the east, Davis County has a space and density problem — nothing new for Utah’s Wasatch Front. As the county’s population grows, officials are realizing they don’t have the time or space to waste on business parks that sit empty after 5 p.m. or neighborhoods with space for sleeping only.
Farmington City is taking notes from Salt Lake and Utah Counties to get ahead of the I-15 curve by building North Farmington Station, a master-planned community in Farmington. The city hopes to center the development on existing public transportation and bring people and companies north to save citizens a commute.
“Farmington City is a developing city; we’re not completely built out,” says Brigham Mellor, city manager of Farmington City. “We’re the nexus of four different highways, and we’re in a unique position as a small city: We have a much larger population that we affect because of the influx of people that come into our community on a daily basis. We have challenges that exceed most cities of our size.”
The perfect blank slate for sustainability
According to Mellor, almost 10 years ago, the land where North Farmington Station is now being developed stood empty and divided between about 30 different property owners. Without even roads to many properties, the city and developers worked to buy up the land and build growth-promoting infrastructure.
A few years and $30 million later, Mellor says the area is ready, and developers are eager to take advantage of the rare space.
“From the bench of the Wasatch Mountains to the bay is two miles at the narrowest point. Two miles from the edge of the mountain to the Great Salt Lake,” Mellor says. “We have to plan appropriately, and that’s why these master-planned developments are so great; we’re looking at it from all different angles.”
“Someone living at North Farmington Station could jump on the shuttle connection that goes right to the FrontRunner, and from there, go downtown to a Jazz game, a hockey game, the orchestra, anything they want.”
— Trevor Evans
The key to North Farmington Station’s success is sustainability. Allowing residents to live, work and play in the same community prevents the need for too much travel in and out of the area, improving air quality and lessening road traffic on I-15. By developing the land with multiple, around-the-clock uses in mind, no space will go to waste.
“There’s an office park component. There’s a little bit of retail. But the primary focus for North Farmington Station is to be a job center,” Mellor says, clarifying that this won’t be “your typical 1990s office park.” Instead, the housing component will give the area “a life after 6 p.m.”
Travel wise, live SMART
Future North Farmington Station citizens won’t need to leave the area often, but if and when they do, public transportation will be readily available to get them anywhere worth going. Currently, the FrontRunner connects the heart of Farmington to two central locations in Downtown Salt Lake City. When visitors arrive at either location, free shuttles and TRAX lines can take them anywhere they need to go.
STACK Real Estate, one of the lead developers of North Farmington Station, specializes in “transit-oriented” communities. Having previously built out business parks in Lehi, Utah, STACK is taking advantage of Farmington’s blank slate to hone its craft and truly focus the community on public transportation.
Trevor Evans, VP of development at STACK Real Estate, has been working on North Farmington Station since 2019. He categorizes the development as a SMART community.
“SMART actually stands for sustainable, mixed-use, attractive, realistic and transit-oriented,” Evans explains. “Our mission at STACK is to build people up by building these SMART communities.”
SMART communities “build people up” by bringing all their needs to one central location and providing public transit options for further destinations. Evans believes Utahns avoid public transit because it is not the easiest way to get around; most people already have to hop in a car to drive to FrontRunner and TRAX stations. But if cities and communities removed that friction by building neighborhoods and entertainment attractions along transportation “nodes,” there would be less need for private transportation.
“Someone living at North Farmington Station could jump on the shuttle connection that goes right to the FrontRunner, and from there, go downtown to a Jazz game, a hockey game, the orchestra, anything they want,” Evans says. “Then they get back, and they’re right back to their community.”
The success of North Farmington Station and transit-oriented communities in general, however, relies on other cities taking the same approach. If there’s nowhere to go on the train, why take the train at all? Evans believes the shift toward these transit-oriented community nodes will take a generation, but “if no one’s leading out and saying we need to think about growth differently, then we’re just going to continue to sprawl and put all of the infrastructure dollars toward expanding highways.”
Throughout the planning process, Mellor says his greatest fear is regret. “I hope that we don’t get to a point where, 20 years down the road, we look at something and go, ‘We really screwed up. We really should have. We knew this was coming, and we needed to address this, but we didn’t. … Let’s take full advantage of the space we have now, build it out and plan for the future.”
Evans agrees, saying that although they aim to complete the project by the 2034 Winter Olympics, the most important thing is doing it right.
“We are residents of Utah. We live here, we work here, we play here, we drive up and down I-15. We know every pain that everyone else feels, and we figured, why not try to be a part of the solution?” he says. “There is not going to be a silver bullet. But if we can have an incremental impact to lessen it, or give an option to not jump on I-15, that is our definition of success.”
