Along Alabama's Gulf Coast, the damaging effects of the BP oil spill remain visible: Too many businesses haven't recovered, and countless residents' lives still bear the scars of the hellish summer of 2010.

In Montgomery, officials with the state Department of Tourism and Travel see the big picture. They're working on it. Tourism revenue isn't big only for Alabama's Coast; it's critical for the whole state — especially public education, which gets no small amount of its annual budget from Gulf Coast tourism revenue.

Thus, a vital part of the tourism department's multi-pronged effort to jump-start the coast's travel industry is an advertising campaign that features … Taylor Hicks?

In all fairness to Hicks, a former American Idol winner, let's hope this isn't indicative of the plans the tourism department has for rejuvenating tourism on the Gulf Coast.

This reconstruction needs more than Idol-inspired star power.

Often lost in Alabama's story of the BP spill is the effect the April 20 disaster had on virtually anyone who lives in the state. While the Gulf Coast counties of Mobile and Baldwin are ground zero of the spill, the rest of the state is hardly immune to the effects. In the grander sense, we're all in this together.

The numbers tell that part of the story.

A large portion of the $679 million that's generated statewide in state and local tourism tax revenue comes from Mobile and Baldwin counties, the Mobile Press-Register has reported. Obviously, that's been damaged by the spill. The year before the spill, $3.1 billion was spent on Gulf Coast tourism in Alabama.

Meanwhile, Alabama's Education Trust Fund gets a sizeable portion of its funding from Gulf Coast tax collections that have been slammed by the spill: sales, income and utility taxes, for instance. The revenue lost from those collections during the height of summer-vacation season is expected to have a profound financial effect across the state.

That's why Joe Morton, the state superintendent for education, said in June that he would send BP a bill for revenue Alabama's public schools lost because of the spill. If BP declined the bill, Morton said he would sue.

That's also one reason why Attorney General Troy King has filed suit on behalf of the state against BP — a lawsuit Gov. Bob Riley thinks is premature. The governor's right. Riley, like Morton, would wisely prefer an attempt at an out-of-court settlement, not a drawn-out, lawyered-up legal battle.

Nevertheless, it's all part of the complicated, thorny — and critical — process of rebuilding the tourism base on Alabama's Gulf Coast.

But instead of filming TV spots with a former American Idol winner, perhaps the best way to show off the beauty of Alabama's coast is to do just that — show the beaches that have been repaired: Clean, inviting and worth the trip south.