GRANDVIEW, Mo. — If you’ve ever hosted a big party at your house, you likely understand the mad dash to clean up the place as the celebration creeps closer.

So with a party as big as the 2023 NFL Draft, you can guess how much pressure there is to pick up around Kansas City.

That includes the surrounding metro, like Grandview where crews were working Monday.

While the area might be a little out of the way for people coming in from the airport, NFL Draft visitors might be going as far away as Topeka, Kansas, to get a hotel room — not to mention all the people driving in from the South.

So even cities like Grandview will have a lot of eyes on them, and the clean-up work goes beyond the standard public works crews.

Even Grandview Mayor Leonard Jones was out working Monday.

The trash pick-up along the interstate has become a part of his weekly routine. Every Monday after lunch, he’s out for two hours, he said.

“Coke bottles and trash and papers and litters,” Jones said.

“We have found money,” Grandview City Administrator Cemal Umut Gungor said. “We have found sunglasses. We have found unopened cans, soda pop.”

“We’re on the east side of I-49, what we now call the East Roundabout. I estimate, we probably pick up 500-1,000 pounds just in an hour or two,” Grandview Public Works Director Doug Wesselschmidt said.

Gungor said the wind, traffic and even truck beds can all be blamed for trash getting out onto the interstate.

Jones said the clean-up effort is a goal that goes further than the draft. Tens of thousands of people pass through on I-49 every day — with more on the way.

“So you’ve got an influx of people, but more importantly, you have your residents,” Jones said.

“It’s the image. It’s ‘what do they see?’ and then once they see something, what do they equate with what they’ve seen,” Jones said.

Crews at the clean-up said that if they don’t pick up the trash, it will almost certainly end up getting carried away into the closest streams.