NASCAR truck driver White has hands on Sun Peaks wheel as mayor

“I really want this place to prosper,” said White, who was a Tod Mountain lifty in the late 1980s. “For Sun Peaks, if you look at the master plan from 1993, we’re only halfway built. There is an East Village to be built and a lot of infrastructure to still happen.”

White has been living and working in Sun Peaks for more than 30 years, his family’s construction businesses responsible for development across the municipality.

Pushing for more infrastructure will be among his top priorities over the next four years.

“We’re kind of at a choke point with a couple of things. Our sanitary sewer is kind of maxed out,” said White, who accompanied CFJC Today for a look at the wastewater management system. “We need to get some infrastructure going on that immediately. And, hydro – we have to get more hydro up here.”

White said his company, Powder Ventures Excavations, has a strong relationship with BC Hydro.

“I’m actually a preferred installer with my company,” he said. “I’m going to be working with them to see if there is something we can do sooner than later. We don’t have enough hydro to put EV chargers in every parkade. We need more power to do that. We either need to have a substation or we need to bring in more power up the main from down in the Tolko area and Heffley.”

White said he plans to support youth and education. At the moment, students must advance through three separate schools scattered across the municipality to reach high school graduation.

“My son was actually one of the first ones last year who went from kindergarten to Grade 12 [in Sun Peaks],” White said. “So, it’s very important to us. We’re spread out right now. We’ve got three different places where we’ve got different grades. We’re hoping that with new government, maybe we’ll get moved up the list for a brick-and-mortar school out in the East Village.”

White said sports are of great importance to the development of young people and he wants to make sure athletics of all sorts are supported in Sun Peaks.

The new mayor has plenty on his plate.

White said he is vice-president of the Sundance Hotel and on the board of directors for several organizations, including the Sun Peaks Alpine Club and Sun Peaks Freestyle Club.

Can he handle mayoral duties while taking on those responsibilities and running his company?

“I certainly can, yeah,” White said, noting he has scaled down his racing career in recent years. “If you ask my wife, sometimes I come home with a business idea and she says no. At this point, we have five businesses, so we’re probably going to tone down on a couple of them. But, I’ve always been known to take on a lot of tasks, and so far so good.”

White said his career in racing has taught him a lot about marketing and business, skills he said are transferrable to his new gig on council.

He also learned from Al Raine, the inaugural and longtime Sun Peaks mayor who died in 2024.

“He helped build the framework for ski-resorts legislation in British Columbia,” White said. “His knowledge of how ski resorts work in co-operation with the provincial governments … it was unbelievable what he knew and how he would carry himself.”

White said he was told by Raine about 10 years ago he was not quite ready for civic duty.

Now, his hands are on the wheel.

“Hopefully, now I can take this new task and what we say up here is, ‘Be like Al,’ because he did it right,” White said. “If I can be half of what Al was, I’ll be a be a really good, successful mayor.”

by Marty Hastings

NASCAR truck driver White has hands on Sun Peaks wheel as mayor

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