Accusations Over Door Ads

The campaign for East Hampton Town Board and supervisor intensified this week with Democratic Party officials suggesting that the Republican candidates have coordinated with a new political action committee with ties to an out-of-state helicopter charter service. Republicans deny any coordination.

Door tags supporting the election of Tom Knobel, the Republicans’ candidate for supervisor, and Lisa Mulhern-Larsen and Margaret Turner, the party’s candidates for town board, were placed at residences. On their reverses, the tags’ content is critical of incumbent Supervisor Larry Cantwell, Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc, and Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, all Democrats. The advertisement was paid for by a group called the East Hampton Leadership Council, and states that it “was not expressly authorized or requested by any candidate or candidate’s political committees or any of its agents.”

The Democrats, however, pointed out that the pictures of the Republican candidates are identical to those used on the party’s own website and in its advertising, and suggested Republican collusion with the group.

The New York State Board of Elections lists a Manhattan residential address for the East Hampton Leadership Council, which records indicate is the residence of Lance G. Harris, a New York attorney. At a meeting in July 2014, Mr. Harris was identified to Mr. Cantwell and Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez as a member of the board of directors of HeliFlite, a New Jersey helicopter service that is among the plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging flight restrictions at East Hampton Airport that were enacted by the town board this year, according to Ms. Burke-Gonzalez. That meeting included representatives of aviation interests who “wanted to work constructively with the town,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez said. HeliFlite Shares LLC gave $5,000 to the East Hampton Town Republican Committee in July, according to the board of elections.

The plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the new restrictions, implemented in response to complaints about noise from an increasing number of flights into and out of the airport. The restrictions include curfews on aircraft deemed noisy, a category that includes most helicopters.

The East Hampton Republican Committee issued a statement on Monday denying involvement with the ad campaign. Photos of the candidates, according to the statement, “are not from our print ads but appear to have been taken off the Internet.”

“The group that put out the door hangers,” the statement said, “obviously has an interest in a proactive East Hampton Town Board that doesn’t skirt the issues and its responsibilities to the people.” A statement attributed to Mr. Knobel said that “Residents deserve a town board that will listen and work with the citizens to find solutions, to represent and serve all residents, avoid litigation, and move East Hampton forward to be the best town it can be.”

Calls to Mr. Harris and to Kurt Carlson, HeliFlite’s chief executive, were not returned. Jonathan Weinstein, a vice president in the New York office of Mercury LLC, a lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., said that he is the East Hampton Leadership Council’s spokesman. The council, he said in an email, “is a group of concerned citizens who are unhappy with the lack of leadership from Town Hall. We are advocating for the real leaders who will solve the problems in East Hampton, not continuing the destructive policies of the incumbents, which are resulting in lost jobs, lost business, and higher taxes.”

Mr. Weinstein did not respond to a request for the East Hampton Leadership Council’s membership roll.

In a release issued by the Democrats, Mr. Cantwell said that “as long as I am supervisor, we are going to maintain local control of our own airport for the benefit of the entire community. Our town will not be run so that outsiders can make money at our expense.”