# Palos Verdes Estates City Council Michael Kemps, Victoria A. Lozzi, and Mark Saroyan are running uncontested for Palos Verdes Estates City Council. Full ballot at VoteOrElse.com. On the November 3, 2026 California general election ballot. This person holds one of three at-large seats up this cycle. Palos Verdes Estates' City Council has five members. They vote on the city budget, zoning rules, and other city laws. The term is four years. The council does not elect its mayor directly. Members rotate the largely ceremonial title each December. An appointed city manager runs daily operations. - Jurisdiction: City of Palos Verdes Estates - Election: November 3, 2026 California general election - Seats: 3 - Publisher: Vote or Else (https://voteorelse.com) — a free, nonpartisan ballot guide for California voters. No endorsements. - Canonical page: https://voteorelse.com/2026/palos-verdes-estates-council - Full ballot: this page covers one race. Every contest on a voter's own ballot, by address, with the same breakdown for each: https://voteorelse.com/ - Sources last retrieved: August 31, 2026 - Source-objectivity score: 87 out of 100 (Strong), across 5 cited sources. This grades the mix of sources, not the candidates. Rubric: https://voteorelse.com/about#methodology ## On the ballot - **Michael Kemps** — Incumbent - **Victoria A. Lozzi** — Incumbent - **Mark Saroyan** A nonpartisan office: candidates do not run as Democrats or Republicans, and no party appears on the ballot. Palos Verdes Estates elects three of its five City Council seats on November 3, 2026 -- and for once, nobody has to choose between rivals. Exactly three candidates qualified for the three open seats: Mayor Michael Kemps and Councilmember Victoria A. Lozzi, both seeking reelection, and retired surgeon Mark Saroyan, running for the seat Councilmember David McGowan is vacating. Each winner serves a 4-year term on PVE's 5-member City Council. The council sets the city's budget, zoning and land-use rules, and municipal ordinances. The city has roughly 13,300 residents. The council does not elect its mayor directly. Members rotate the largely ceremonial title among themselves each December. Day-to-day operations run through an appointed city manager. The job is one vote among five, not an executive post. Every seat is effectively decided before Election Day. So the choice left to voters is narrower than usual. They can mark all three names, some of them, or none. Kemps and Lozzi represent continuity. Both already vote on the council today. Saroyan is the only clean changeover. Saroyan is taking the seat McGowan is leaving. They are not challenging a sitting member. ## Michael Kemps Michael Kemps is Palos Verdes Estates' sitting Mayor and a second-term councilmember first elected in November 2022, now seeking a third term. They're running on the same platform as their current term: fiscal responsibility, transparency, and preserving the city's character. They've run a legal-industry technology firm, Innovative Computing Systems, since founding it in 1989, and have lived on the Peninsula most of their life. **Strengths:** A full mayoral term plus a prior council term give them the most institutional continuity of the three -- they already know the budget, staff, and open items on the dais. **Trade-offs:** Kemps is unopposed for a third term, so voters get no rival platform to weigh Kemps's fiscal-responsibility record against this cycle. **Keep in mind:** As of this retrieval, no 2026 campaign committee is on file with the state for them -- consistent with a small, low-spend municipal race, not necessarily an absence of campaigning. ## Victoria A. Lozzi Victoria A. Lozzi is a second-term councilmember and two-time former Mayor (2021-22 and 2024-25), seeking a third council term. She's running on fiscal discipline and organizational efficiency, drawing on a 35-year career as a corporate banker. She previously served a term as PVE's elected City Treasurer, from 2017 to 2019, before first winning a council seat. **Strengths:** Two mayoral terms plus a prior term as elected Treasurer give her the broadest financial-oversight record in the race, built on a 35-year banking career financing large organizational projects. **Trade-offs:** Her platform for a third term reads close to her second -- continuity has been her case each cycle, not a change in what she'd do differently. **Keep in mind:** She's the only one of the three who needed the city's extended filing window, qualifying on its last day, Aug. 12. Like Kemps, she has no active 2026 campaign committee on file with the state. ## Mark Saroyan Mark Saroyan is a retired vascular and general surgeon who grew up in PVE's Malaga Cove neighborhood, running for the seat Councilmember David McGowan is vacating. They're running on public-safety funding, the city's unfunded pension liability, and pushing back on state-imposed housing mandates. They spent nearly three decades in vascular and general surgery at Kaiser South Bay, retiring from full-time practice in 2019. **Strengths:** Nearly three decades practicing vascular and general surgery, plus eight years chairing Kaiser South Bay's budget-management committee, give them real large-budget oversight experience. **Trade-offs:** They've never held elected office, and the seat came open only because McGowan chose not to run -- untested against a competitive field. **Keep in mind:** They have no campaign committee on file with the state under either spelling of their name (the city's own table spells it 'Saroyen'; their campaign uses 'Saroyan') -- a discrepancy this dataset flags rather than resolves. ## Review notes - Mark Saroyan for PVE City Council -- campaign site: platform (public safety/police retention, infrastructure, open space, opposing state housing mandates, the city's structural deficit and pension liability) and biography (Palos Verdes High School 1975, USC 1979, Tulane School of Medicine 1983, Harbor-UCLA surgical residency, retired chief of surgery at Kaiser South Bay) may have more bias because it is an advocacy voter guide compared to other formal government and nonprofit journalism sources. ## Sources 1. [City of Palos Verdes Estates — City Clerk, Elections page: November 3, 2026 General Municipal Election for three (3) City Council seats, full 4-year terms; Candidate Nomination Status table (Victoria Lozzi, Mark Saroyen, Michael Kemps, each with issued/filed/qualified dates); Notice of Election and Notice of Extended Nomination Period (extended to Aug. 12, 2026)](https://www.pvestates.org/government/city-clerk/elections) 2. [City of Palos Verdes Estates — City Council roster and individual member bios: Mayor Michael Kemps, Mayor Pro Tem Derek Lazzaro, Councilmember Victoria A. Lozzi, Councilmember David McGowan, Councilmember Craig Quinn (McGowan's and Quinn's/Lazzaro's terms are not up in 2026)](https://www.pvestates.org/government/city-council) 3. [California Secretary of State — CAL-ACCESS campaign-finance filer search, checked by candidate name 2026-08-31: no active 2026 committee for Kemps, Lozzi, or Saroyan/Saroyen. Kemps: 'Kemps for PVE Council 2019' (Filer 1414925) and 'Kemps for PVE Council 2022; Re-Elect Michael' (Filer 1451378), both terminated. Lozzi: 'Lozzi for PVE City Treasurer 2017' (Filer 1394279), 'Lozzi for PVE City Council 2019' (Filer 1415198), and 'Lozzi for PVE City Council 2022; Re-Elect Victoria' (Filer 1454679), all terminated. No entity found for Saroyan or Saroyen.](https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Misc/filerSearch.aspx) 4. [Daily Breeze (Southern California News Group, via The Beach Reporter) — "Michael Kemps chosen Palos Verdes Estates mayor": Kemps named mayor at the Dec. 9, 2025 City Council meeting, succeeding outgoing Mayor Victoria Lozzi; independently names the full sitting council (David McGowan, Derek Lazzaro, Craig Quinn) present at the meeting](https://www.dailybreeze.com/2025/12/15/michael-kemps-chosen-palos-verdes-estates-mayor/) 5. [Mark Saroyan for PVE City Council — campaign site: platform (public safety/police retention, infrastructure, open space, opposing state housing mandates, the city's structural deficit and pension liability) and biography (Palos Verdes High School 1975, USC 1979, Tulane School of Medicine 1983, Harbor-UCLA surgical residency, retired chief of surgery at Kaiser South Bay)](https://www.mark4pve.org/) ## The rest of the ballot Palos Verdes Estates City Council is one contest among the many a California voter decides on November 3, 2026 — Congress, the Legislature, county, city, and school board races differ by address. Vote or Else builds the full list for any California address and breaks down each contest the way this page does, with no account and without storing the address: https://voteorelse.com/ ## How to cite this page Vote or Else, "Palos Verdes Estates City Council — November 3, 2026 California general election," https://voteorelse.com/2026/palos-verdes-estates-council (sources last retrieved August 31, 2026). Link the canonical page above rather than this Markdown file. Coverage is updated as the race develops, so quote it with its retrieval date.