A former Corporation of Hamilton employee who admitted accepting a bribe over a parking ticket will be sentenced in two weeks.

Paula Thomas, 65, admitted agreeing to accept “lunch and a drink” from Cassandra Trott in exchange for not inputting her parking ticket into a monitoring system when she appeared in Magistrates’ Court in January.

Trott, 57, from Pembroke, received a conditional discharge in July 2023 after she admitted offering or promising Thomas “a few drinks” and “lunch and a drink” as a reward for not processing her parking tickets.

Thomas, from Smith’s, also admitted not issuing Trott a summons “in anticipation of” being offered another reward, as well as lying about the status of a parking ticket to benefit Aneika Francis.

Thomas committed the offences between July 2019 and January 2022, when she was working for the Corporation of Hamilton.

She was also charged with agreeing to accept “a few drinks” from Trott and attempting to pervert the course of justice by concealing a summons issued to herself as a result of having parking tickets, but those charges were dropped in January.

Prosecutors also dropped a charge that Thomas and 50-year-old Lindell Foster, who was another corporation employee, did not input another parking ticket into the system “with intent to cause loss to the Corporation of Hamilton”.

Ms Foster, from Devonshire, was discharged from the case, but the City placed both women on administrative leave in April 2023.

Prosecutor Daniel Kitson-Walters said on Monday that Thomas committed the offences while in a “position of significant trust and responsibility” and suggested she be fined between $5,000 and $6,500.

However, Charles Richardson, Thomas’s lawyer, said his client received “no financial gains whatsoever” by committing the offences and requested that she be given a conditional discharge.

Magistrate Craig Attridge adjourned the case to March 17 for sentencing and extended Thomas’s bail until that time.

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