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Updated 2:25 PM Friday, November 20, 2009

Here are this week’s  “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” selections:

One of Hamilton/Fairfield’s favorite sons, Major League Baseball’s Jim Tracy, hit the jackpot this week. First, the Fairfield native won the award for National League Manager of the Year for the miracle he performed this past season with the Colorado Rockies. When Colorado manager Clint Hurdle was fired in late May, the Rockies were 141/2 games out of first place. Tracy, a graduate of Hamilton Badin High School, took the helm and then took the team into the playoffs as a wild card team. After the honor was announced, the Rockies gave Tracy a three-year contract to continue as the team’s manager. Congratulations on a job well done. When they’re not playing the Reds, we’ll be rooting for Tracy’s Rockies again next year.

We love it when a plan comes together. The city of Hamilton recently learned that it will receive nearly $200,000 from the Ohio Cultural Facilities Commission and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to go toward the construction of an amphitheater and an extension of the city’s bike path along the Great Miami River, as part of the RiversEdge redevelopment project for the old Mercy Hospital site. As staff writer Richard Wilson reported recently, $1.1 million already had been lined up — thanks to the Ohio Department of Transportation and the Hamilton Community Foundation — for the $1.7 million project. City planners hope the new amenities will help to attract a mix of residential and retail development on the old hospital site. We hope they’re right.

Thumbs up to the 50 senior students from Hamilton and Badin high schools who participated in the daylong “Civic Day” on Thursday, Nov. 19. The annual program — started in the mid-1940s — gets some of Hamilton’s top students involved in a variety of tours and mock meetings of governmental bodies and agencies. Staff writer Richard O Jones noted, in his account of the event, that Mayor-elect Pat Moeller participated in Civic Day when he was in high school, as did current school board members George Jonson and Larry Bowling. We hope to see some of Thursday’s participants in local leadership roles some day.

Congratulations go out to Trenton police veteran Lt. Tim Traud, who was promoted to chief of the Trenton Police Department this week. Traud is no stranger to the position, having served as interim chief in two previous stints. After Carl Ray resigned the job unexpectedly earlier this year, Traud was promoted to take the top spot on a permanent basis. He’s been with the department since 1981 and has served under several chiefs of police. We wish him the best of luck in his (almost) new role.

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