When Dailey Haren left Moab for college, she never expected to end up back in her hometown, much less involved in local politics.
“I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here,” says Haren.
But today, Haren, along with Cody Priano and Laura Long, finds herself actively involved in Kane Creek Development Watch, a citizens’ group dedicated to stopping a proposed 180-acre development along Kane Springs Road. The group has raised $19,498 so far, gathered 18,000 digital signatures in an online petition started by Long, and on May 7, celebrated Grand County Commission denying a sewer plant permit to the developers, who are expected to appeal the decision.
After college in Salt Lake City, Haren spent several years running an eco-housing company in Reno. But when she returned to Moab to help her father with general contract work, she came back with a “completely different perspective.”
“As soon as I was out in the world, I realized my hometown is actually an incredibly rare and unique place,” says Haren, now 33. “The community itself was like gold.”
In 2020, Haren led an unsuccessful effort to prevent land next to Looking Glass Rock from becoming a glamping resort.
“I really, really cared about that piece of area and it was very special to me,” she says. Haren felt like Moab community members were getting inaccurate information, so she went undercover: She got a job catering at Under Canvas, the company creating the resort, to gather information and then sounded the alarm to Moab locals.
“I had the PR person for Under Canvas on my doorstep the next day,” she says. However, the development continued unimpeded. Today, ULUM Resorts offers single-tent reservations for $499-$749 per night.
Haren looks back at her Under Canvas experience as a warm-up to her current work with Kane Creek Development Watch.
“[Looking Glass] was an interesting fight because I felt like I did it by myself,” says Haren. “I learned about how the whole system works. I also felt like I fully grasped just how big the big money coming to town was.”
Cody Priano, who also grew up in Moab, remembers that sentiment well: he spent part of his childhood watching Moab citizens slowly lose a prolonged legal battle against the Lionsback development.
“The community took it as, ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. The people with deeper pockets will always win,’” he said.
While Haren was a self-described “overachiever,” Priano says he was “on the fast track to just be a burnout. I was just playing music, partying, and riding my bike.” But he found his rhythm in the mountain biking world, crediting it for giving him a sense of community.
Today, at 33, Priano owns and operates two businesses in the biking space. When Dailey Haren moved back to Moab, she walked in to buy a bike and instantly reconnected with her old high school classmate, who was meeting friends there. Haren and Priano have been together for nearly four years.
Priano’s family has owned property for generations on Kane Creek. He says that he rides past the Kane Creek development spot often, and for the last two years, he’s seen nothing happening on the land. Watching the developers finally break ground earlier this year, he says, shocked him into action.
“It made it real,” Priano says.
Priano made the decision to start the Kane Creek Development Watch Instagram account when he was standing next to the development itself, looking over the dirt. He had seen a petition started by a then-stranger named Laura Long that opposed the development. With his own money, Priano bought $100 worth of Instagram ads to boost Long’s petition.
Long remembers watching it go viral. A 29-year-old transplant, originally from the suburbs of Chicago, she first moved to Moab in 2019 to work as a mountain biking guide and has lived full-time in Moab for the last one-and-a-half years.
“I ride my bike out to Kane Creek Road all the time,” she says, saying the development was only “vaguely” on her radar.
“I started reading the newspaper when I was becoming a local. That’s what you do,” she says. “The more I dug up, the more annoyed I would get.”
Long got particularly obsessed with the origins of Utah House Bill 22, which allowed the Kane Springs Improvement District board of trustees to go from being entirely made up of county commissioners to entirely private developers.
“I still, to this day, don’t consider myself a hardcore activist, but I do have these core beliefs that democracy is for the people, of the people, by the people,” she says.
After reaching out to the Grand County commissioners and trying to figure out who exactly supported the development, Long came to the conclusion that “nobody agrees this should be happening.”
Both of Long’s roommates encouraged her to start a petition. Long, who currently studies software engineering at the Turing School bootcamp, made a simple Google Docs form and linked it to a Notion website with enabled analytics. After Priano boosted the petition with ads, her page count shot up.
“There were 1,500 people—new people—clicking on that link per day,” she says. “There were Instagram influencers who caught wind of the situation and shared it on their stories.”
At this time, more than 18,000 people have signed Long’s petition, including 1,500 Grand County residents.
“It was chaos at first,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this alone. I need help.’”
The first time that Long, Haren, and Priano all met in person was at the January 16, 2024, Grand County Commission meeting that more than 100 people attended to speak out on the Kane Creek project.
“Dailey and Cody just have such good energy,” says Long. “I was stoked when I met them.”
The three started collaborating, using a donated subscription to Microsoft Teams to organize community members into collective action.
“We fell into a vortex together,” says Haren.
The day-to-day routine for all three Moab locals consists of multiple jobs, schoolwork for Haren and Long, and in between, constant messaging about issues regarding Kane Creek Development Watch. Haren describes her work as that of an operator, helping hundreds of volunteers connect and work together.
When asked what the difference between her resistance against Under Canvas in 2020 and her current work with Kane Creek Development Watch, Haren points out the “huge, huge upwelling of opposition” for the Kane Creek project.
“It feels like it’s just bigger. It’s really important to a lot of people,” she says. “This one, I think we can win.”
