Tujunga Ca

As skies cleared and the Station fire's threat to Tujunga ended, Cathy Ouellet cautiously ventured back outside Saturday, taking her two young sons to a local park. "Maybe the air isn't great," Ouellet said as she wrangled her fussy 2-year-old. "But the kids wake up early, and we couldn't go out at all last week." Residents went through their daily rhythms, happy that a sense of normalcy was returning to the area that took the brunt of property losses in the 154,000-acre blaze.

Graduate students in Pepperdine University's business school will present tonight the results of a study on the correlation between crime and alcohol outlets in Sunland-Tujunga. The study, to be presented at a public meeting, echoes some of the findings presented in a groundbreaking report published last year by USC researchers Richard A. Scribner, David P. MacKinnon and James H. Dwyer.

The Los Angeles Planning Department will hold a workshop Thursday on the community plan for Sunland-Tujunga / Lake View Terrace / Shadow Hills / La Tuna Canyon area. The city's 35 community plans comprise the Los Angeles General Plan and are updated periodically to provide guidelines for development. "This is just an update to the plan, not a full-scale revision," said Phil Garofalo, a city planner, noting that such updates usually take place every five to 10 years.

In a step taken with little fanfare but nonetheless significant for Sunland-Tujunga residents, a Los Angeles City Council committee on Tuesday approved a blueprint for growth along Foothill Boulevard. The Planning and Land Use Management Committee approved the Foothill Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan, a plan to attract higher-quality businesses to the boulevard and to restrict new apartment buildings to a few specified areas.

With creeping blight an increasing problem, residents and business owners along and near Commerce Avenue in Tujunga took a step Thursday toward taking back their neighborhood from drug dealers, troublemakers and apathetic landlords.

A town hall meeting will be held today at the Sunland-Tujunga Municipal Building to field residents' concerns over problems in the community. Coordinated by the Community Action Network (CAN), a volunteer group, the meeting will be a forum to discuss crime, graffiti, transportation and the quality of education in local schools. CAN, founded in 1992, focuses on community issues that its members believe are not properly addressed by the government.

He fought the good fight, running a brilliant campaign for honorary mayor that captured national and international media attention. But in the end, Farley the German shepherd mix came in third, losing to a telecommunications executive and a Bavarian chef. At a special installation dinner to be held Saturday, AT&T executive Dick Starr, winner of the race for honorary mayor, will take over for outgoing Honorary Mayor Ralph Zenger.

At the northern tip of the Crescenta Valley between the San Gabriel and Verdugo mountains, communities still take pride in living close to the land. An annual highlight is the Sunland-Tujunga Watermelon Festival, which starts Friday. Now in its 47th year, the watermelon fest remains a throwback to the farming life. "The best part of the story," however, according to Marynance Schellenbach, secretary of the local Lions Club that organizes the festival, is the event's origin.

City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel said Monday she intended to tighten the city's law to combat "mansionization" in Sunland-Tujunga by requiring builders to count the square footage of attic space in their calculations of allowable size. The city requires that the maximum size of new homes in the area be based on lot size. Greuel said that one homeowner got around that by not counting an attic in the square footage and later converting the attic into a room.