When Councilman Bob Wieckowski first broached the hotel tax hike, he talked up Fremont as a hotspot for tourists, which generated some raised eyebrows at the press table. Other than Niles, it’s hard to think of any attraction in Fremont that would make someone book a hotel room here. It’s more of a day trip city.

So here are some suggestions for new attractions that could get more people into city hotels:

The Central Park Goose Poop Obstacle Course
Why bother spending all those millions on a new water park when geese provide plenty of fun for free.

The Left Turn Arrow Museum
Left turn arrow traffic lights weren’t invented in Fremont, but the city has embraced them nonetheless.  For some reason traffic engineers here just don’t trust anyone making a left to nudge into the intersection and complete the turn when the coast is clear. Drives me nuts. Maybe it’s time to celebrate the history of traffic signals that keep the roads so safe for pedestrians and so frustrating for drivers.

The Men’s Health Monument

I’m convinced that nothing makes Fremont officials prouder than having been named the Healthiest City for Men by Men’s Health Magazine. You’d be surprised how often the accolade works its way into city reports that have nothing to do with health. It was even mentioned in this year’s budget. To memorialize Fremont’s triumph, perhaps the city, which has doubled in population since 1970, could build a monument to its own virility. The structure above would do the trick. It could be the centerpiece of the city’s planned downtown or, even better for tourism, a new red light district.

Last week, Josh Isenberg’s home near Mission San Jose High School was burglarized. This week, unhappy with the percieved lack of police response, he and his wife, Bing, are circulating a petition demanding the city make burglaries a bigger priority.

The petition, which they plan on eventually taking to the City Council demands more aggressive patrolling, more aggresive investigations of residential burglaries and rescinding the 2005 city policy, at least publicly,  of not responding to burglar alarms.

The burglar(s) broke into Isenberg’s house through a sliding glass door during the day and stole a safe, flat screen television and jewelry. It was horrible shock, which Isenberg thinks should be a top priority for Fremont police.

“If they have other crimes taking up their time, I’d like to know what they are,” he said.

Isenberg said he knew of about 10 homes within a 10-block radius that have been burglarized in the past year. So far he has about 100 signatures on his petition, and is aiming for 10,000.

For those who don’t remember, in 2005 Fremont’s understaffed police department stopped responding to burglar alarms because the department was losing $600,000 a year responding to false alarms. The next year burglaries jumped 14 percent, although police said at the time they didn’t see any correlation. For the story we wrote in 2006, click here.

We’ll try to get more recent police stats and more info on the petition in an upcoming post.

You might have noticed that comment from Hayward superstar reporter Matt O’Brien inviting TCB readers to switch over to his blog at the Daily Review’s web site and check out an admittedly pretty cool map tracking wildcat sightings.

You could do that, but since we’re all one big happy corporate family here at MediaNews Group, I figured I’d just steal his map and put it on our blog. That way no one has to sift through the Review’s ho-hum posts to get to the good stuff and Mr. O’Brien can now publish my posts about the cutest vegetarian competition, which I’m sure he was following religiously.

Here it is:

View Larger Map

Fremont Councilman Steve Cho didn’t just raise hackles at last week’s council meeting by asking to cancel a trade mission to China. He also pitched using volunteer cross walk guards at city elementary schools and giving Fremont Unified School District the roughly $175,000 a year the city spends on professional crossing guards.

Council members didn’t seem too enthused and City Manager Fred Diaz was displeased to say the least.

For more details, click here for the story by Wes Bowers in the Fremont Bulletin, which is owned by the same company as The Argus.

I asked Cho — who, by the way, is running for mayor – about the proposal late last week, and he said he would pitch it again during a joint school board/council meeting next week. However, he didn’t seem too optimistic that either board would embrace it.

Kristi Yamaguchi can sleep peacefully tonight; she’s still Fremont’s reigning sweetheart. Ashley Peterson of Fremont got smoked like a sausage in the finals of PETA’s Cutest Vegetarian Alive competition, even though she converts 95 percent of the carnivores she dates.

Kelly Anderson of San Antonio, Tex. is your champion.

Had Ashley won, she would have been the high-pitched voice of young vegetarians everywhere and possibly the next top PETA model.

Now it’s back to the grind for the 21-year-old aspiring voice-over artist. And for the Tri-City Beat (TCB),  its time to focus more on hard news and less on objectifying young, female vegetarians. Thanks for the memories, PETA.

It’s been mentioned around here that Ashley might have been jinxed by her constant exposure in the TCB. Similar hexes do exit.

We’ll find out for sure about this supposed Tri-City Beat curse later this year when the TCB starts flagrantly campaigning for the surefire next mayor of Fremont: Linda Susoev.

For most of yesterday, this was the not-so-thorough top story on our web site.

The story was about East Bay Municipal Utility District announcing that it might have to ration water this year, which would affect a lot of East Bay residents. What the story didn’t mention is that Tri-City area residents are served by the Alameda County Water District, which is not anticipating any rationing, according to Operations Manager Walt Wadlow.

ACWD is less dependent on the sierra snow pack than East Bay MUD and has a more diverse water portfolio, Wadlow said. So the short of it is, don’t expect any water rationing this summer.

Tonight, Fremont is taking a second stab at trying to turn the area around Fremont’s BART station into something resembling a downtown.

The city has tapped San Francisco-based development firm TMG Partners to spearhead a development on Capitol Avenue, which could turn the road into a hotbed of commercial activity with plenty of housing and public space to boot.

Just two years ago, developer William Faidi unveiled an ambitious plan that would have extended Capitol Avenue to Fremont Boulevard, and built a public plaza and lots of retail and housing  on the expanded street.

But, those plans fizzled when Faidi and his relatives started suing each other over family assets. Faidi, who owns the shopping center at Mowry Avenue and Fremont Boulevard (the one with the Barnes & Noble), was too preoccupied to pursue the development, and the city decided to ditch him and go with TMG. Fremont still needs to get Faidi and his property involved in the project, though, if it is to be as ambitious as Faidi’s plan.

Assuming the City Council approves a Memorandum of Understanding at tonight’s meeting, TMG will have 180 days to come up with a conceptual development plan.

Usually when we get e-mails from Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, it means he’s voted for a bill or introduced legislation that has little chance of becoming law.

Let’s see if this one goes the distance.

Stark was one of several lawmakers today who introduced legislation to provide workers with 12 weeks of paid leave in order to care for a new child, sick family member, recover from an illness, or respond to an emergency arising from deployment of a soldier.

The current federal law allows up to 12 weeks of UNPAID leave.

Hard to see the sitting president signing this one, but he’ll be sitting in Texas next year, so I guess time will tell.

For more info on the legislation, click here.

Ashley Peterson is both an irresistible force and an immovable object. The 21-year-old Fremont resident devoured Cupcake Klimski to reach the finals of PETA’s Cutest Vegetarian Alive Contest.

The only person standing between Ashley and soy protein immortality is Kelly Anderson (pictured right), an 18-year-old vegan from Texas, who bears a slight resemlance to leather-clad rocker turned animal rights diva Chrissy Hynde of The Pretenders.

From the looks of it, this should be a dairy-free cakewalk for Ashley, but anyone who wants to pad her margin of victory, click here to vote. Balloting runs through April 23.

If there’s one thing we love to do here at The Argus, it’s make a stink over public employees who make a lot more moolah than we do. Sometimes we go after cops or firefighters or even teachers.

Maybe you noticed, we sometimes get so riled up, we’re barely capable of writing original headlines, like here and here.

Our all-time favorite target is Washington Hospital CEO Nancy Farber, but today, as in days past, its Fremont City Manager Fred Diaz.

On Tuesday, the City Council is scheduled to give Diaz a five percent merit raise, which will bring his annual salary to $250,137. He’ll actually get a little more when certain benefits are accounted for, and, of course, he’s going to get a really big pension. He’s also entitled to a full year’s severance pay the City Council one day decides that Diaz isn’t bee’s knees after all.

Diaz’s raise is actually one percent less than most city employees got last year. For my most recent story on Fremont’s fiscal health, click here.

Have a good weekend folks.