Eleven lawmakers from the Gulf Coast have formed a bipartisan caucus to advocate for the region's priorities, the new group's co-chairmen announced yesterday. First up: convincing Congress to devote 80 percent of the tens of billions of dollars in penalty payments expected from last year's oil spill to the area's economic and environmental recovery efforts.

The co-chairs of the Gulf Coast Caucus, Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), said the group is the first-ever caucus to focus attention on the region.

Although its first priority is securing the oil spill penalty money, the caucus is sure to find a variety of other issues to tackle in short order. Over the past decade, the Gulf Coast has withstood a battery of hurricanes, suffered a massive oil spill, served as center-stage in a nationwide controversy over offshore oil drilling, and played host to some of the largest environmental restoration projects in the world in the Everglades and the Mississippi River Delta.

Gulf Coast lawmakers are concerned that unless they act, the penalty money -- perhaps as much as $21 billion, given the size of the spill -- will flow into the U.S. Treasury and be spent elsewhere.

But among lawmakers from the various Gulf states, there is little agreement yet on the details of how the money should be divided. Several bills that would capture and send 80 percent of the penalties to the Gulf would take a variety of different approaches to divvying up that share of the money among the states.

The bills recommend everything from sending a majority of the money to Louisiana, which bore the brunt of the spill's environmental impacts, as Sens. Mary Landrieu (D) and David Vitter (R) have proposed, to dividing the money up based on coastline miles, as Florida Sen. Bill Nelson's (D) bill would.

Another point of contention: how much should be spent on environmental versus economic recovery. While Louisianans have pushed for spending on environmental recovery, other Gulf state leaders, such as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), have emphasized the economic needs, pointing to the decline in tourism (Greenwire, June 2).

"Obviously, there's a lot of details to work out," said Scalise. But he emphasized that the lawmakers all recognize the need to capture the 80 percent. "We did come to that agreement."

Members of the caucus include Scalise, Castor and Reps. Pete Olson (R), Gene Green (D), Blake Farenthold (R) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D) of Texas; Alan Nunnelee (R) and Steven Palazzo (R) of Mississippi; and Cliff Stearns (R), Jeff Miller (R) and Steve Southerland (R) of Florida.