CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio – Cleveland Heights Mayor Kahlil Seren, who voters recalled earlier this month, awarded multiple lucrative graphic design contracts to a longtime friend before hiring her to a full-time city position last year, according to invoices, financial records and social media posts.
Frances Eugenia Collazo, who at the time lived in central Ohio, received more than $65,000 in city contracts from January to October 2024. One of the projects she worked on was never put out to bid. Another saw Collazo win the contract, even though her bid was twice as high as any other.
And the city paid her $12,000 to redesign the Planning Department’s website — a project that the city did not ultimately implement.
After nearly two years as a contractor for the city, Collazo was hired in October to a full-time position in the city’s communications department, where she was initially paid a salary of $65,000 per year.
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer asked for a copy of Collazo’s application to that position. None was provided, and no application is listed in Collazo’s personnel file.
Seren then elevated Collazo to the city’s communications director in June. He fired the former communications director, Jessica Schantz, after his intention to replace her went public on social media.
Collazo now makes more than $114,000.
Collazo’s career has largely been in graphic design and the arts. She previously performed as a DJ under the moniker “Puerto Rican Knife Gang,” and organized fashion shows and photograph and video shoots, according to her biography on her website.
She also blogs about her work in Cleveland Heights on her website, where she has criticized residents who requested police body camera video after officers questioned Seren’s wife, Natalie McDaniel, about trespassing into a residence. Collazo called those body cam requests “perverted voyerism [sic].” In other posts, she has rebutted residents’ accusations that she politicized the city’s newsletter.
“My job is to produce receipts for the public,” she wrote in a post earlier this month. “That means telling you exactly what we did, when we did it, what it cost, who did the work, and how you can check the record yourself.”
Cleveland.com reached out to Collazo multiple times for comment on her personal relationship with Seren and McDaniel, as well as questions about her contract work for the city. She did not respond.
‘I love you guys’
Collazo’s relationship with Seren dates back at least to 2011.
Seren wrote an endorsement for Collazo on LinkedIn in which he said they worked together on a website redesign in March of that year and praised her for her “invaluable design insight and technical knowledge.”
Seren also hired Collazo in 2015 to design a campaign mailer in his run for a second term on Cleveland Heights City Council. At that time, Collazo lived in Florida and Seren paid her business, Haus of Adams, $80 for the front-and-back mailer, according to campaign finance and business records.
But the relationship was not just professional.
Collazo posted a photo on Facebook in November 2013 that showed Seren and McDaniel standing on a hotel balcony. Collazo wrote that she “crashed a honeymoon” in New Orleans, tagged Seren in the photo and included “#Natalie” in the caption.
“I love you guys,” Collazo wrote.
Collazo’s LinkedIn page says she attended Loyola University in New Orleans from 1996 to 2001. McDaniel also attended Loyola University in 1996 and lived in New Orleans until she moved back to Cleveland in 1999, according to court records.
Seren and McDaniel began dating in 2006.
First contract
In January 2023, Collazo was living in Newark, Ohio when Seren tapped her to design Focus on the Heights Magazine, a thrice-yearly publication that features profiles of city staff and information about city government and community events.
The city agreed to pay her $120 per page of each edition of the year’s magazine and ended up publishing two editions that year that totaled 120 pages. The summer edition listed Collazo as the graphic designer and art director. The city’s full-time communications staff provided the majority of the content for the magazine.
If the city paid Collazo according to the contract, the two editions would have cost the city $14,000, according to the contract.
However, the law department did not provide cleveland.com with any records related to payments to Collazo for the year 2023.
Cleveland.com reached out to the law department to ask whether Collazo was paid for her work in 2023.
Cain Park
In November 2023, the city solicited bids for a rebranding of Cain Park, including designing a new logo, color palette, and style guide, as well as creating the 2024 season brochure, mailers and signage.
The city received four bids, with three of them ranging from about $2,000 to $9,600, according to documents provided by the city’s law department.
Collazo’s initial bid was $17,225. She later submitted a revised bid for $14,725.
Seren gave the project to Collazo, her second major graphic design contract from the city that year.
Collazo ultimately billed the city for $18,465 for her work on Cain Park.
Focus
The city again hired Collazo to produce the 2024 editions of Focus magazine. In 2024, the city published an extra edition of the magazine, splitting the Fall/Winter edition into two separate publications.
The city paid Collazo $32,520 for her work on the magazine in 2024.
The first invoice the city provided to cleveland.com was from January 2024 and included emails from Collazo to then-Interim Finance Director Tara Shuster.
Collazo asked Shuster to pay her through the Automated Clearing House — a direct bank-to-bank electronic payment that is often used for direct deposits.
“The city doesn’t usually do this,” Shuster wrote in response. “I have no problem but will need to verify the information.”
Shuster then provided Collazo’s invoice and payment information to another finance employee and wrote on a sticky note attached to the document to approve the transfer.
“Please do not post as a journal entry. She should receive a 1099 but no payment is linked to her,” Shuster wrote in the note.
The city’s finance department logs each expenditure in its journal. Cleveland.com asked the city for an explanation of why the finance department would not post the payment as a journal entry and why no payment was to be linked to a contractor who had been doing work with the city for a year.
An expanded role
Those are not the only contracts the city awarded Collazo.
Seren amended her initial Focus magazine contract in May 2024 to expand her scope of work for the city to include “miscellaneous graphic design projects for city communications that have been approved by the Mayor’s Office.”
Collazo then began billing the city for things including $45 a piece for Facebook and Instagram graphics and posts, $225 for designing the city’s “Grow More May” yard signs and $45 for a graphic to include in a text message sent to residents from the Mayor’s Action Center.
The work also included the $12,000 redesign of the Planning Department’s website, paid in increments of $4,000.
When it came time for the final payment in September 2024, Shuster emailed a copy of the invoice to Director of Planning and Development Eric Zamft, asking for his approval before she issued the payment.
Zamft did not respond until Oct. 9.
“I was able to see a work product today and now am comfortable signing off,” Zamft wrote.
It’s unclear why the city did not launch the new website.
From contractor, to associate, to Director
Collazo was hired one week later to a communications associate position. Her offer letter said she was to report to then-Communications Director Mike Thomas.
Thomas said in a recent interview that he had no say in the decision to hire Collazo.
“The mayor told me we were hiring Frances for a full-time position in my department,” Thomas said.
Seren fired Thomas in late 2024, and replaced him with Schantz, a lecturer at Cleveland State University and former editor of the Heights Observer magazine.
As Seren came under increasing scrutiny amid several scandals involving him and McDaniel, Collazo released a letter in June signed by 18 of the city’s more than 400 employees that said there was no hostile work environment and praising Seren.
Less than three weeks later, Seren abruptly fired Schantz and installed Collazo in her place. Seren and Collazo claimed Schantz had “leaked” to the press a private conversation in which Seren told her he was considering replacing her with Collazo—after word of the move surfaced on social media and a reporter had called him to confirm it.
In an email back to Seren, Schantz wrote that she spoke to one person for professional advice, and then a reporter called her asking to confirm the move that same evening.
Cleveland Heights City Council on May 19 passed legislation to require the mayor to disclose all contracts between $7,500 and $50,000 to both council and the public. Previously, the mayor only had to disclose contracts for $50,000 and above.
There were no contracts posted anywhere on the city’s website as of Tuesday afternoon.