CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — Records show that Cleveland Heights Mayor Kahlil Seren accessed some city council members' emails rather than go through public records requests, but he claims to have had good reason to do so.
Activity logs provided to me show Seren searched a year's worth of emails involving two council members.
Those records indicate Seren performed a search once in December 2024 and twice in May of this year.
"If Governor DeWine quietly and personally tapped into every single email sent or received by Democratic legislators in the state house and then said, trust me, this is just a part of my job, we would all call that an abuse of power and the same principle applies here in Cleveland Heights," Cleveland Heights City Council member Jim Petras said.
Seren said it shouldn't come as a surprise that he was reviewing council emails, as he had repeatedly asked members to voluntarily turn those over.
"It's no secret whatsoever," Seren said. "This is not something council members are unaware of."
For about a year, Seren told me that he had been investigating whether the council had violated the Open Meetings Act.
He explained the investigation began through a request for assistance from the clerk of the council.
"The council clerk was mistakenly provided information that shows their sort of secret meeting behavior. Their (city council's) employee reached out to the administration for assistance. Shortly after receiving that information, they were contacted by council leadership related to that and were told to assist in covering it up," Seren said. "This isn't something we take lightly."
Seren said the council has been warned before about potentially violating the Open Meetings Act.
"It's the unfortunate habit, I think, and long standing habit of council members of discussing public business in ways that are not in accordance with our laws," Seren said.
I asked if Seren found what he was looking for while going through council members' emails in December and May.
He told me he believes he found violations of the Open Meetings Act but didn't go into detail. He did provide one allegation that Council President Tony Cuda discussed the meeting minutes from a previous Saturday through his personal email.
"What I was hoping for and what I've continued to ask the council members for is a voluntary and hopefully not too oppositional participation in the investigation into how they do their business," Seren stated. "No interviews, virtually no questions answered, no documents revealed or released upon our request. Now I'm to the point where I'm getting ready to close that investigation down. We're gonna shut that down and we're gonna move on."
He plans to publicly release the results of his investigation once finished.
Seren's main goal of releasing the details is for transparency, he said.
I asked Seren why he wasn't going through the public records request process for the council's emails, given that the activity logs showing him accessing their emails were produced through requests.
He said that weeding through emails without going through the request system is not unusual.
"The idea that the administration, which is tasked with ensuring that all of the laws are followed, doesn't have the ability to take a look to investigate is ridiculous and all it really does is make our city weaker and allow sort of an out of control legislative body to simply do its own business and be subject to no oversight other than its own," Seren said.
An email thread between a council member and the Director of Information Technology for Cleveland Heights reveals there is "no explicit access set to your email account for the Administration."
"Any request for such would have went through my office," Cleveland Heights Director of Information Technology Ryan Prosser told a council member in May via email.
Seren admitted to accessing the council's emails through the city server.
"This isn't a situation where anybody's getting hacked or anything like that," he added. "This is a normal aspect of an administration."
However, on Monday, council members begged to differ during the Administrative Services Committee meeting.
Council member Jim Posch described Seren's access to their emails as "creepy."
"Maybe he is the expert on what is and what is not creepy. I could see that, but in this case I think it's confusing to think that he would be unaware or taken by surprise that somebody in the organization might have access to the public records that are stored on the servers controlled by the organization," Seren said.
According to Seren, council members do not have the same access to surf his emails if they'd like to. He claims that is a power reserved for the executive branch despite Prosser painting a different picture to a council member two months ago via an email shared with me.
At the next Cleveland Heights City Council meeting, a legislative item is scheduled to be introduced that would prohibit the review of city email accounts without a public records request.
"I think many of us never thought that we would ever need this, which is why something did not already exist, but after learning that the mayor has in fact personally accessed our emails, I guess that Councilman Cobb decided that he would go about drafting that legislation," Petras said on Sunday.
Petras said he'll likely push for that ordinance to be approved.
If the legislation is still read this upcoming Monday, that would mark its first reading. It can be approved after a first reading by emergency. Otherwise, it needs to undergo three readings before a vote.
"It's a disappointing revelation," Seren said.
Seren was not present at the last council meeting on June 30, so we inquired if he would be present at the upcoming meeting on Monday.
"I've had a pretty great track record of attendance at council meetings since 2015, so I'm not terribly concerned about my attendance record," Seren said.
Seren does plan to appear at Monday's council meeting.
"I don't know that they have any intention whatsoever in taking my perspective into account, even the members of council who are running for mayor right now who might actually, long term, if they are successful in their bid for mayor, be a little bit more interested in my perspective on the restrictions on the mayor that they are attempting to enact at this point," Seren said.
