PROVIDENCE — The prosecution and defense both rested yesterday in ex-Lincoln Town Administrator Jonathan F. Oster’s bribery and conspiracy trial, meaning that the three-week-old trial could go to the jury tomorrow .

Associate Justice Gilbert V. Indeglia said he still needed to go over jury instructions with lawyers for both sides and then each had to make their closing arguments before the jury could begin is deliberations.

Oster is facing two counts of bribery and two counts of conspiracy to commit bribery in connection with what the state says were two schemes to extort bribes from potential buyers of a piece of town-controlled land on Route 116 during Oster’s 2000-2002 term as town administrator.

The state rested just as the trial resumed before the jury in the afternoon. The defense then presented its case, calling only two witnesses of its own, current Lincoln Tax Assessor Elaine Mondillo and Walter R. Moon, a law client of Oster’s who had visited Oster’s office the day Oster was arrested.

Defense lawyer C. Leonard O’Brien questioned Mondillo about how the town classified the land Oster is accused of seeking bribes to sell. The site, known as the H&H Screw property, has been in legal limbo since 1991, when no one offered to buy it at a tax sale. The town has been reluctant to take title to it for fear of being stuck with a potential multimillion-dollar task of cleaning up hazardous materials that were dumped their during its use as a manufacturing site.

The state charges that then-Oster ally, Planning Board member and co-conspirator Robert R. Picerno, was tasked with finding a buyer who would be willing to pay bribes to buy the property for $105,000 while Oster was supposed to get the sale approved by the Town Council. The $105,000 would have been a favor, the state argued, because more than $700,000 in back taxes were owed on the six-acre parcel.

In his 2004 trial, Picerno pleaded no contest to four counts of taking, or trying to solicit, bribes, and three counts of conspiracy to solicit bribes.

Two of the Oster counts concern a plan in the summer of 2001 to get Lincoln car dealer Robert Campellone to buy the land in exchange for a $25,000 bribe. He backed out of the deal in September 2001. Picerno then tried to convince contractors David Wayne Daniel and Robert Gelfuso to pay the bribes for the $105,000 cost. However, instead of paying Picerno, Gelfuso and Daniel contacted the state police.

One of the defenses raised by O’Brien was that the $105,000 was not a favor to a buyer, but a bargain for the town, since it would have gotten a piece of property that had not generated tax revenue since1991 back on the tax rolls and saved the town from the cleanup bill.

To make that case, O’Brien used Mondillo to enter into evidence assessor’s office records that showed the property classified as tax exempt, with no reference to any back taxes due. He said anyone who went into Town Hall in inspect the records could conclude there were no taxes due on the land

Mondillo said that notation as tax-exempt was probably done as a bookkeeping convenience to make sure the owed taxes on the property wouldn’t be counted as taxes expected to be paid when the town did its tax-rate calculations for the budget year. It would be misleading to include H&H Screw back taxes in any revenue estimates, she said, because without a buyer, there was no chance they would be paid.

Moon testified how he had stopped by Oster’s law office on Louisquisset Pike the morning of Feb. 16, 2002, but saw Oster busy with other clients and had left. He described how, when he was driving away, he was pulled over by state police who searched his car and his person. He said they thanked him for his cooperation and let him leave.

The visit occurred while state police had Oster’s office under surveillance for his meeting with Picerno. Picerno was wearing state police audio transmitters and the office was being videotaped from outside as well.

jhill@projo.com