You know the Hog Days Festival is right around the corner when you see Kewanee’s public works department crews repainting the white lines on the pavement in the downtown area.

The city workers have been repainting crosswalk lines and curbside parking areas for the last few days.

City Manager Gary Bradley said the painting is just one of the jobs the city crew does to get ready for the world’s largest pork barbecue and other festival events.

Asked what the workers do to prepare for Hog Days besides the painting, Bradley said, “There’s a lot.”

The Public Works Department performs a general “sprucing up” of the city that will be receiving many out-of-town visitors for the Labor Day weekend festival.

They’ll be cleaning the downtown alleys and picking up trash, Bradley said.

The public works folks will be paying particular attention to parts of the city that the visitors are most likely to see: Downtown, where the carnival will set up; along the route of the Hog Days parade; and the highways that run through Kewanee.

That means trimming trees and cutting weeds in those areas.

City workers will also cover the route of the Hog Days Stampede to make sure there aren’t any pavement problems along the way.

“We want to make sure those surfaces are as good as we can make them,” Bradley said.

And during the festival the public works employees go through the carnival area collecting trash bags from the receptacles and running the street sweeper to pick up trash from the preceding day’s fun.