Patrick Wimberly took $50,000 to sell city land. Everyone else paid for it.

This is an editorial. It reflects the opinion of Inkster Now! The factual claims in it come from federal court records and contemporaneous reporting, each linked below. Our news coverage is held to a separate standard, described in our ethics policy.

INKSTER, Mich. In the spring of 2022, the mayor of this city decided that a piece of land Inkster owned was worth $100,000 to him personally.

Not to the city. To him.

He got $50,000 of it before the FBI stopped the deal, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan. Patrick Wimberly pleaded guilty. In August 2025, Judge Linda V. Parker sentenced him to 24 months in prison.

This is not an allegation and it is not contested. He admitted it.

What the record says

Read that detail about "10 a month" again. That is not a man who drifted into a mistake. That is a man auditing his own bribe schedule and finding it insufficient.

The arc

Inkster's recent history runs in three parts, and the middle one is the point.

2015 to 2019. Byron Nolen's first administration. The city was operating under a consent agreement with the State of Michigan, the step before emergency management, where a community's financial decisions stop being entirely its own. By the city's own account it negotiated its way out and closed the term with a general fund surplus. We laid out that record, and its limits, in our piece on the Nolen years.

2019 to 2023. Wimberly, a former council member, beat Nolen and took the office. Then the thing above happened.

2023 to now. Indicted in October, he lost to Nolen in November and the city handed the job back to the man it had taken it from four years earlier.

That is the shape of it. A city claws out from under state financial oversight, elects someone new, and he starts selling its property out the back door within three years.

What we could not find, and will not invent

We went looking for the other side of this ledger. Programs started, buildings opened, budgets balanced, anything a four-year term leaves behind.

We found almost nothing in the public record.

We are telling you that rather than papering over it, and we are not going to manufacture accomplishments to make a piece feel balanced. But we want to be precise about what that absence means and what it does not. It does not mean nothing happened between 2019 and 2023. A city runs. Trash gets collected, budgets get passed, people get hired. It means we could not document it, and a thin public record is itself worth noticing in a city that has gone largely uncovered for years. That gap is part of why this newsroom exists.

If you can point us to something real from those years, we will publish it. That offer is genuine.

What it actually cost

The $50,000 is the smallest number in this story.

He was selling land the city could not afford to lose. Inkster had just climbed out from under state oversight. Public property is one of the few assets a cash-poor city controls. Parcel 1 was not his to price.

He was paid to do the opposite. $105,000 a year, from residents whose own water bills and tax bills are a live argument in this city.

And he spent the thing that takes longest to rebuild. Three years later, when a developer brought a $75 million data center to the council with a Planning Commission recommendation behind it, residents packed city hall and the project died without a single council member making a motion.

We are not suggesting those events are formally connected. We are saying that a city which recently watched a mayor get convicted for selling land has earned its suspicion of land deals, and anyone who found that October meeting surprising was not paying attention.

Public corruption does not end when the sentence does. It gets priced into every meeting afterward.

The part that should sit uncomfortably

He was indicted in October 2023. The election was in November 2023. He ran anyway, and people voted for him.

He lost, and the system worked: the FBI intervened, a prosecution followed, a judge imposed a sentence, and voters removed him. All of that is true and worth saying in a year when people doubt whether any of it still functions.

But he did not lose in a landslide of universal disgust. Some residents stayed with him. Any honest account of this has to hold both: Inkster removed him, and Inkster was not unanimous about it.

What we expect now

Inkster is again led by Byron Nolen, and we have been clear that much of the record from his administration is the city's own account of itself, not independently audited. That is not an accusation. It is a description of how thin the verification layer is in a city this size, which is exactly the condition that let the last scheme run for months.

So the standard we will hold, for this administration and every one after it:

None of that is hostile to Mayor Nolen. It is the job. The reason it matters here more than in most places is that Inkster already knows, with a federal judgment to prove it, what happens when nobody is watching the land.

Patrick Wimberly is entitled to respond. If he or his attorney wishes to give a statement, Inkster Now! will publish it in full and unedited. Reach us through our contact page or the newsroom tip line.

Inkster Now! takes no position on any candidate for office and accepts no advertiser or donor influence over coverage. If any fact above is wrong, tell us and we will correct it at the top of this article the same day.