After six months of work, the city of Reno unveiled Transparent Reno on Thursday, a website that details all checks the city writes to vendors — from the phone company to the Bank of New York for various bond payments.

During a press conference at City Hall, City Manager Andrew Clinger said the website will give citizens a chance to thumb through Reno's finances as part of its "online checkbook". For example, the city has sent the Public Employees Retirement System $15.2 million this fiscal year. The website, which will be updated weekly, will also offer easy access to the city's database on business licenses, fire and police calls and the amount of energy produced by Reno's windmills on top of City Hall.

In the next six months, the website will launch a searchable database on salaries and benefits for every city employee. Clinger said the final phase will feature a database for every city contract.

"We will be the first city government, the first county government, in Nevada to post a database that has an online checkbook," Clinger said, adding the website was produced using existing city resources in house. "No other local government in the state has that. So we are the first."

Clinger said city staff will work with members of Hack4Reno, a collection of local web gurus and designers, to generate web and mobile applications based on the data featured on Transparent Reno.

Don Morrison, the community manager at the Reno Collective who participated in Hack4Reno, said Reno's new website will hopefully result in citizens taking the data and creating new ways of understanding it online such as easy-to-read graphs.

"That's why the data is there," Morrison said.

Added Assistant City Manager Kevin Knutson, "It enables people to ask the right questions."

Steven Miller, the vice president of policy at the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think-tank in Las Vegas that runs the state-focused Transparent Nevada, praised Reno's website in a statement:

"By putting its spending checkbook online at TransparentReno.com, the City of Reno has taken a giant step forward, ensuring that its citizens can see exactly how their tax dollarsare being spent and who is receiving them," Miller said. "This tool will allow anyone with a computer to monitor and review city finances, greatly improving public accountability for city spending."