Opinion 10-103

October 29, 2010

          This responds to your inquiry (10-103) asking if you may participate as a “waiter, bus boy, cook or dishwasher” at the annual spaghetti dinner fundraiser for the local chapter of the [ ] Club and whether you may participate in “cooking/selling/serving hot dogs and hamburgers” from the club’s trailer at the club’s summer fundraiser program.

          Your participation as a waiter, bus boy, cook or dishwasher is not prohibited fundraising activity under the Rules Governing Judicial Conduct. However, you may not participate in selling if the food is sold, “at a substantially higher price than such [food is] sold in other retail commercial establishments in the community, as a fundraising measure” (Opinion 89-53). Thus, you may participate as stated in the annual dinner fundraiser, but, as you state the food sold at the summer fundraiser program is sold for profit, you may not participate in selling food from the club’s trailer. As for cooking and serving from the trailer, if payment is simultaneous or virtually simultaneous with the serving of the food, you may cook, but you may not serve, the food. However, if payment is made in advance at a separate location from the trailer, you may both cook and serve the food. The fact that people approach the trailer with tickets proving they had paid earlier, and thus are entitled to be served food from the trailer, does not render improper your cooking or serving the food (Opinion 10-22).

          Enclosed, for your convenience, are Opinions 10-22, 99-89; 90-28; 89-53 and 89-18 which address this issue.