With winter festivities behind us, grownups working their jobs and kids resuming their schooling, it’s time to put noses to grindstones and shoulders to loads and get on with the task that is Navigating 2023.

But before we push off on that long and uncertain tubing down the turbulent Esopus Creek of Time, your Editorial Team sees value in putting out into the universe some aspirations — things we’d like to see happen before this time next year.

In Kingston, 2023 will be a major local election year. The mayor, Common Council president and all nine council seats will be decided by voters on Nov. 7. We’d like to see a thoughtful and meaningful race well-populated with Kingstonians from all walks of life. We hope this results in a more transparent city government that listens more to its citizens.

We’d also like to see an end to the city’s most disturbing trend: Cyclists and pedestrians getting killed on city streets. We hope all their users put safety first, be patient and keep their eyes open.

Speaking of trends, we wish Godspeed to the affordable/workforce housing projects already under way and we’d like to see the genesis of several more. A “tiny houses” village? Please and thanks!

We’d also like to see the city’s classic “Old Faithful” restaurants and businesses not only hold their ground, but grow.

We’d like to see what’s left of the city’s “wild spaces” remain accessible to everyone (Cough, Hutton Brickyards.)

In Uptown, we’d like to see some important long-vacant spaces returned to usefulness again. We’d also like to see at least the consideration of an elevator at the Stockade Drive lot to make it easier for those with mobility issues The way it is now, it’s either the stairs or the hill, neither of which works well for some folks.

In Midtown, we hope for the continued success of community-based groups like the Center for Creative Education and the emergence of more leaders from the neighborhood.

In the Rondout, we hope we never see again the kind of flooding that came last month, but we’re afraid the warmed globe has different plans. We also wish the cultural institutions down there — ASK, the Hudson River Maritime Museum, the A.J. Williams-Myers African Roots Center, ArtPort, the Reher Center and the Trolley Museum of New York — growth and happiness. (The same goes for cultural groups and institutions in Uptown and Midtown too.)

For anywhere in the city, can we please get a skatepark?

We’re aspirationally visualizing HARD for the Wurts Street Bridge, all fixed and spiffed up, open to both vehicle and pedestrian traffic.

We’d also like to see continued engagement between Kingston people and the NoVo Foundation. Mutual understanding is the path to wisdom, after all, and we will need all the wisdom we’ve got for the challenges ahead.

We hope for a county government that continues to improve our mental health and addiction treatment infrastructure. We also hope for far fewer people killed and lives ruined by opioids.

In regards to the school district, we’d like to see kids’ continued recovery from the number the pandemic did on their education. We’d also like to see the superintendent return our phone calls.

Statewide, we hope that the nomination of Hector LaSalle as chief judge of the Court of Appeals is considered very carefully by the state Senate. And we’d also like to see the adult-use cannabis situation get straightened out and something like “Ye Olde Stockade Weede Store” open in Uptown by springtime.

We hope for price stabilization everywhere, from corn chips to roofing shingles. And eggs. Oy vey, the eggs.

When it comes to Central Hudson, we’d like to see a few things. One is compensation for everyone who had money wrongfully taken from them by the utility’s billing system, which was not ready for prime (or any) time when they turned it on. (But, to their discredit, they turned it on anyway.)

Where that money comes from is an interesting question. Local pols, mindful of Kingston’s socialist bent, say the bill should be footed by “the stockholders,” implying people who own Fortis stock are capitalist pigs with plenty of coin to redistribute. Some probably are but, according to publicly available information, Fortis stock is split just about evenly between institutional and individual investors. Some of those institutional investors, like Vanguard, manage retirement assets — IRAs, 401(k) accounts — for millions of people, maybe even you. There’s no way to tell who owns Fortis stock on an individual level, but we wouldn’t be surprised if locals are overrepresented in that group. (Eat local, shop local, invest local?) The impact of shareholders losing value because of a payout to victims seems low to us, but as our leaders proceed to “otherize” Fortis/CH stockholders, keep in mind that some of those stockholders might be you or people you know and like.

Second, obviously, is we’d like to see the billing system sorted out. We’d also like to see serious consideration given by the state legislature to Sen. Michelle Hinchey’s bill that would restrict utilities from “billing by guesstimation” by mandating more meter reading and less use of farkakte algorithms which seem to err on the company’s side far more often than the customers’.

We could go on; despite journalists’ reputation as hard-bitten cynics, the Editorial Team are actually very hopeful people. But we’ll close with this: for our friend and role model Uncle Willy, we’d like to see a year and many more to come in which he shares his warmth and awesomeness all over Kingston.