CHARLESTON -- State Sen. Evan Jenkins wants cities that depend on user fees for revenue to be more transparent with their spending.

The Cabell County Democrat says he will introduce a bill this week that would instill trust in the public that cities are using the fee for its intended purposes.

"Public officials are selling these user fees for well-intended purposes, but there's no obligation that it be used for those purposes," he said. "The public, rightfully so, has become very skeptical of those promises."

Jenkins' efforts come in the wake of Huntington Mayor Kim Wolfe proposing to increase the user fee from $2 a week to $3. Anyone who works in the city, regardless of where they live, must pay the fee.

Huntington's user fee was implemented in 2002 at $1 a week and went to $2 a week in 2003. It has remained largely unpopular with the public, and some City Council members who have said it is not being used for public safety and street repairs, its intended purposes.

Jenkins' said his proposal requires any city with a user fee to adopt an ordinance outlining how the revenue will be used. The revenue also would have to be placed into a special account.

"Talking to people in the community, their greatest frustration is not seeing results from the user fee," Jenkins said. "With the latest proposal, everyone is saying, 'Here we go again.' So why not create a mechanism that holds public officials to their promises?

"I think people would be willing to invest more in city services if they know they will see results. This is a way of giving them that assurance."

Jenkins' bill would not be retroactive, meaning cities that already have user fees -- Huntington, Charleston and Weirton -- would not be required to set up special accounts unless they increased the fee.

"My hope is these cities look at this legislation as an opportunity to do it voluntarily," he said. "It shouldn't have to come to the Legislature forcing them to do it."

Huntington is the only one of the three West Virginia cities with a user fee that doesn't use some variation of a tracking system to show its constituents how the money is spent. Weirton places all of the revenue from its $2-a-week fee into a special line item in its general fund, City Manager Gary DuFour said. All of the revenue is used for street paving.

Charleston, which also has a $2-a-week user fee, has a special paving account separate from the general fund, Finance Director Joe Estep said. The city has put signs along freshly paved roads to let motorists know the user fee funded the work, he said.

Charleston also hired 20 police officers in the two years that followed the adoption of its user fee. The city still tracks the annual costs of those officers, Estep said.

Wolfe said his administration already has discussed the creation of a special account for the $1.6 million in projected revenue from the $1 increase in the user fee.

"If City Council approves the increase and as long as it's within the boundaries of state law, we will do it," Wolfe said. "I think the public would like to see how much money we are collecting and where it is going."

Wolfe has proposed that the new user fee revenue would go toward hiring four new police officers, purchasing three cruisers, paving eight miles of roads, hiring a street sweeper operator so the city can run two sweepers at one time and purchasing a few new vehicles for the street department, among other things.

Brandi Jacobs-Jones, director of administration and finance, said approximately $300,000 of the new user fee revenue would offset rising costs in the city's police pension fund. Collectively, the police and fire pension funds now account for more than 20 percent of the city's $38.7 million budget. Under the current funding method, those costs will increase 7 percent each year through 2018.