TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Jeb Bush took his sons to the Rose Bowl game this year aboard a wealthy donor’s $20 million Falcon 50 jet, a trip that would have cost $34,000 on the charter market. Instead, Florida taxpayers paid $645.50 for Bush’s flight to California, and Bush paid $1,291 for his two sons. Bush’s payments are covered under the state’s gifts law, which allows elected officials to reimburse owners of private planes by paying the corresponding commercial airfare for the trip. State ethics laws, however, prohibit officials from accepting gifts valued at more than $100 from anyone with business before them.

Bush, when he took office, made it even more restrictive, issuing a policy restricting gifts for him and his staffers to no more than $25. The jet’s owner, Gary Morse, a Central Florida retirement community developer, has extensive dealings with Florida agencies and keeps on retainer Tallahassee lobbyists. The trip in early January came to light 10 months after it was taken only because the Florida Democratic Party sued Bush for failing to provide various public records over many months, which state law requires officials to do in a reasonable time period. “We feel fortunate there are individuals willing to volunteer their planes for official travel use at no additional cost to the Florida taxpayer,” Bush spokeswoman Katie Baur said this week. The state provides an 18-year-old Beechcraft King Air plane for official travel for the governor. If Bush had flown on that six-passenger turboprop, it would have required one stop, taken seven and a half hours and cost taxpayers about $2,500. He could have flown Delta or U.S. Airways that day for $645.50 — the amount paid to Morse. Morse’s three-engine, Falcon 50 jet made the non-stop trip in five and a half hours. That type of jet typically charters for $3,400 an hour, according to Palm Beach Post research.

Bush’s round-trip took 10 hours. Closely held records Bush’s office has refused since taking office in 1999 to reveal which private planes he has used. The Post requested the records of Bush’s travels aboard private planes seven weeks ago. Bush’s office at first said such records are not kept and then said the documents are not kept in an easily retrievable manner. However, it did recently release copies of several “Private Plane Authorization Forms” to comply with the Democratic Party’s lawsuit. The late Gov. Lawton Chiles’ office routinely released the FAA tail numbers of planes on which Chiles was flying when it was not a commercial aircraft. It was that practice, in fact, that helped reporters catalog flights Chiles had taken as gifts on friends’ planes for hunting and fishing trips. At the time, Republicans hammered Chiles for taking trips on the planes of his rich friends, holding legislative hearings and introducing bills to make the practice illegal. The bills were never passed by the legislature.

Chiles’s former communications director, Ron Sachs, said Bush is now doing the same thing. “Usually, the rule is: If the regular citizen in the street could not find the same opportunity, it’s probably not a good idea for the governor to accept it,” said Sachs, now a media consultant based in Tallahassee. “These aren’t really that difficult. Basically, it’s about right and wrong.” Morse’s plane took Bush, his sons George P. and Jebby, Miami developer Ed Easton and Lizzy Easton, one Florida Department of Law Enforcement bodyguard and two U.S. Secret Service agents from Tallahassee directly to Los Angeles Jan. 3, arriving in time for the national championship football game between the University of Miami and the University of Nebraska.

All but the Eastons flew back to Tallahassee the next day. Baur said the office had checked into flying commercially but found that doing so would have required Bush to stay in Los Angeles an extra night. McBride: Bush out of touch Democratic candidate for governor Bill McBride’s campaign immediately criticized Bush’s use of the plane. “He’s out of touch with the way average Floridians have to live their lives,” said McBride spokesman Alan Stonecipher. “There’s one set of rules for him and another set of rules for everybody else.” Morse, who was not aboard the Rose Bowl flight, has frequently let Bush use his planes for campaign trips: both the Falcon 50 as well as a smaller Falcon 10. So far this election cycle, Morse has given the state Republican Party about $58,000 worth of in-kind contributions for air travel. All of that travel was for Bush and his campaign staff. Morse has received $5,039 in reimbursements from the Bush campaign, covering how much the flights would have cost had Bush flown commercially, through the Sept. 5 reporting period. In all, between August 2001 and Sept. 5 of this year, Bush took nearly 50 flights aboard the corporate aircraft of wealthy donors, for which those donors claimed $221,987.46 in “in-kind” contributions to the party, according to a Post review of campaign finance reports published on Sept. 29. Some election law experts questioned whether that practice violates state law because the GOP has not, in turn, reported donations to Bush’s campaign for those flights. While Bush and the state GOP party have repeatedly declined to respond to questions about their use of private planes, party executive director David Johnson said in a letter to The Post, “We follow the letter and spirit of the law.”