Mayor Bloomberg gave another one of his Hurricane Sandy press conferences today and had a little to say about everything (watch below!). But first off, welcome back to school 86 percent of New York City Public School students! We hoped you enjoyed being back in class after a week off because you have tomorrow off because of the election. Yay pre-planned vacations!

"Some 94 percent of the city’s schools were open today," Bloomberg told reporters from a Brooklyn school, "and many more will be open on the next day of classes, which is on Wednesday. Remember, tomorrow, Election Day, the schools are closed. We handed out MetroCards to students staying in emergency shelters to help them get to school. And I can tell you that the preliminary count from schools reporting attendance so far is that 86.3 percent of students showed up today. That’s about the same as on the Monday before Election Day last year, and we didn’t have Sandy last year so it really is great." And that is the gist of his school update.

Beyond students getting back to class, Bloomberg also talked about:

  • The gas shortage ("The supply of gasoline entering our city from interstate pipelines continues to increase. Barges carrying something like 21 million gallons of gasoline also unloaded at the region’s terminals this weekend, and there’s more coming in. It will take a little while to get the distribution to stations. Until the bottleneck clears, lines at the pump probably will remain long.)

  • Power supply ("115,000 customers still remain without service")

  • Housing issues ("NYCHA has completed pumping out water from all affected developments and over the next two or three days our goal is to restore electricity to nearly all developments where it’s feasible, and to restore heat and hot water to about two-thirds of all developments that currently are without them."

  • He even named some new city restoration czars!

Well, not quite czars but something like that. Everyone say hello to our new "community restoration directors": Haeda Mihaltses on Staten Island, Matt Mahoney, in Manhattan and the Bronx, Nazli Parvizi Brooklyn, and Diahann Billings-Burford in Queens. They will "be responsible for identifying urgent needs and deploying resources to meet them" going forward. As Bloomberg explains, "we’re at the stage now where we’ve got to get down at an even more micro-level and make sure that each individual gets the services they need, particularly when we think that in three or four days we’ll have made a lot of progress in restoring both heat and electricity and hot water to a vast bulk of the people who are still without."

And those weren't the only new jobs that Bloomberg announced today. In the wake of all the post-Sandy housing issues facing the city, hizzoner has also appointed "one of the nation’s top emergency management professionals," Brad Gair to the job of director of housing recovery operations. According to the mayor "his mission will be to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to house New Yorkers displaced by Sandy."

Oh, and also? There is no recycling collection until further notice. Something had to give!