The Senate voted today to send what could be billions of dollars in Deepwater Horizon oil-spill fines to Gulf Coast states while committing to a historic expenditure for land and water conservation.

With the eleventh-hour addition of $1.4 billion in conservation funding, the so-called RESTORE Act amendment passed 76-22 with bipartisan support. Supporters of the amendment engineered to offset the cost of the bill by postponing until 2022 the enactment of a repeatedly stalled corporate tax loophole.

Introduced by Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), the amendment will now be included in a broader transportation bill expected to pass the full chamber by Tuesday.

The measure still has a long way to go before it becomes law.

The House has only agreed to a stripped-down version of the legislation that includes no spending. Senators whose support was won with inclusion of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) cash expressed concern that the provision might be stripped in conference talks with the Republican-controlled, spending-averse House.

The LWCF provision would double current funding levels for the program to $700 million for each of the next two years and reauthorize it until 2022, at $1.4 billion total.

"I'm supporting it with the condition that [LWCF] stays in the conference report," Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said. "The RESTORE Act has its proponents, but if the LWCF provision is just being used to move the RESTORE Act only to be removed in conference, I don't think that makes sense. It's not good policymaking, and it doesn't further the goals of LWCF. It's a nice, elegant marriage."

The House is still working on its transportation bill, but Nelson's office said the amendment has a dozen bipartisan supporters in the lower chamber.

The proposal would send 80 percent of potentially tens of billions of dollars in Clean Water Act fines expected to result from last year's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas to pay for economic and environmental restoration projects (E&ENews PM, July 21, 2011).

Nelson hailed the vote in a statement afterward, noting that without a change in the law, much of the money will flow to the Treasury.

"Today's vote was a huge step toward making sure any fines against BP end up in the local communities harmed by the company's oil spill," Nelson said. "Otherwise, the money would go into the federal treasury -- and there's no telling where it might go from there."