CHESAPEAKE, Va. (WAVY) — A federal political action committee is spending thousands of dollars in the race for Chesapeake mayor.

Twice in September, mail was sent to voters in Virginia’s second largest city that attacked current Mayor Rick West, who is running for a second term against first-term Councilman Don Carey.

The ads, paid for by the Patrick Henry Project PAC, specifically call into question West’s leadership after it came to light that in 2022 West asked former City Attorney Jay Stroman to look into a private issue for his stepbrother, who lived in another state.

“After 16 years on City Council, we thought Rick West would know better,” one of the mail pieces states. “We were wrong.”

The mailers both go onto say that “just as leaders like Patrick Henry spoke for freedom against political tyranny almost 250 years ago, now it’s our time.”

While a federally recognized committee, its efforts were solely funded by one Chesapeake couple.

The Patrick Henry Project PAC was organized on Sept. 5, according to records from the Federal Election Commission.

Five day later, the PAC recorded its first donation: $30,000 from Susan Lang, who is from Chesapeake and works as an environmental planner for the U.S. Navy.

On Sept. 30, her husband Jim Lang, an environmental lawyer with Pender and Coward, donated $50,000.

They are the only two listed donors on the PAC’s report.

“Patrick Henry Project … is a group formed to fight corruption in Chesapeake city government,” Jim Lang said. “It was wrong for Rick West to use the city’s lawyers to help a family member whose project in Georgia hit a snag. As Rick’s own email exchanges make plain, his relative wanted to avoid having to pay as much as $10,000 to get an attorney to help him.”

However West, in an interview, painted a different picture of what happened.

While he doesn’t dispute his stepbrother asked for city of Chesapeake lawyers to “take a look” at a conflict he was having with a municipality in Georgia regarding septic hookup, West contends he never directed the city attorney to do anything.

“I asked his opinion,” West said. “I wanted to know what Chesapeake was doing in regards to restricting people ability to do septic systems so that I could advise my stepbrother as to what we were doing and he could use his legal counsel to use the same argument if it applied. That’s all I needed. That’s all I wanted.”

However, the documents viewed by 10 On Your Side show no evidence of West asking about Chesapeake septic systems. Instead, a memo sent to Stroman from a legal assistant simply requested Stroman “look into it” but “not spend a lot of time on it.”

“But you wouldn’t talk to your attorney for Chesapeake unless we’re talking about Chesapeake,” West said, confirming his intentions where not communicated effectively.

West maintains he did nothing wrong. But concedes “I would not have done it the way I did it.”

However the Patrick Henry Project has called West out for blaming his screw up on others.

“Chesapeake’s legal department is paid for by taxpayers to serve us, not the Mayor’s stepbrother,” Lang said.

Lang and his wife have long been politically active. Since 2009, the couple has donated more than $187,000 to mostly Democrats or Democrat endorsed candidates running for office according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Legally, the Patrick Henry Project can not coordinate with any campaign. However the Langs have donated $3,000 this election cycle to Carey’s campaign.

Carey, was first elected to City Council in 2020 with the local Republican parties endorsement. He also had an unsuccessful primary run for the Virginia House of Delegates last year as a Republican.

Now, he is running challenging West, the Republican endorsed candidate, as the Democrat endorsed candidate.

“On the local level, the things that matter to me are not things that matter to … the Republican Party,” Carey said. “I want to fight for affordable housing. I want to fight for flood mitigation . . . I want to fight for integrity and be able to make votes on council without getting phone calls from people who are trying to steer, you know, your decisions that you make. I could not do that within the Republican Party. And you you saw during the tenure of my time on council, the constant head butting between me and the leadership within that party.”

Carey, a former NFL safety, is his campaigns top donor. However State Sen. Louise Lucas, (D-Portsmouth) recently gave his campaign $10,000.

Carey maintains he will not be controlled by anyone.

“I care less about any other outside forces,” Carey said. “None of that has any bearing to here.”

When it comes to the Patrick Henry Project, Carey called the whole situation “unfortunate.”

“But the way you prevent things like that from happening is to not do those things in the first place,” Carey said. “Mayor West has been on council for a very long time. I think he understands what is ethical, what is unethical, the just an unfortunate situation that he decided to have the city of turn to do what he did.”

West, who has outraised Carey 7:1 with mainly support from developers, said this is what he feared would happen when local elections were moved from May to November.

“There’s just so many different personal attacks that we’ve never seen in our city.” West said, referring to the mailers. “We’ve always been able to agree to disagree. Our city was built by strong Democrats and strong Republicans. And so that whole partisan thing really does get in the way and it causes people to do things they wouldn’t normally do. But yeah, I’m very disappointed to see that our city is going is we always thought that we were immune to this kind of politics, but it’s here and unfortunately probably here to stay.”