A new building inspector has taken over for the city of Winnemucca. Sam Duggan has been on the job for four weeks now and is looking forward to all the challenges the future holds.
Duggan has worked as an inspector for more than 30 years, with 11 of those years as the building official for the city of San Gabriel, Calif. He replaces Rick Robinson who moved to Utah with his family.
Originally from California, Duggan says he loves the town. “My girlfriend and I live in a small town called Tehachapi in California. It has a population of about 18,000 so it's bigger than Winnemucca but it has the same feel, same smallness to it.” He says he’s surprised by how busy the city’s building department is. “I was expecting a very small rural town, not very busy at all but this one is growing. It's keeping me quite busy.”
The growth in Winnemucca makes for an interesting day, Duggan says, because he gets to see so many different building projects. “In California, everyone had a specialty where one would do residential, one would do commercial (and) so you basically were in one area only.”
As a fisherman and off-road aficionado, he’s looking forward to what the state has to offer. He’s fished the Sierra Nevada but is looking forward to visiting the area’s high-altitude lakes. He says he eats what he catches, or he releases it.
He says he grew up in a small town east of Los Angeles and by the time he was an adult, the small town was gone.
He wanted to return to the kind of small-town atmosphere he grew up in. He had previously traveled through Winnemucca on the way to different states and liked it, and when he heard the city was looking for a building official, he said he threw his hat in and was chosen.
He and his girlfriend are in the process of looking for property so he can have chickens and maybe a pig or cow. He’s also interested in starting a garden primarily to make salads. “There's so much to be offered here, that I'm going to be really quite busy.”
