Does Spending $ on Google Ads Hurt your LSA ranking?

I have noticed a very strong correlation between people who are ranking top 1-5 for LSA, and them not running google ads.

For the company I work at, as soon as we started to up our PPC spent, we immediately saw a huge decline in our LSA rankings.

Does anyone have any more information on this?

Thanks.

Google Local Service Ads (LSA) are ads which appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs).
And, a keyword search will typically trigger the ads. LSA ads will appear above all other search results, including non-LSA Google Ads and Google My Business listings.
Usually, running LSA and Google Ads against the same ad asset (domain, etc) is not advisable.