Q&A: Civic leader Bill Barker draws on Southern roots

Bill Barker’s sure-handed guidance of the panels plotting the future of the city’s east side Central Park site and the former Garver Feed Mill at Olbrich Botanical Gardens over the past couple of years won respect from both colleagues on the panels and advocates who came before them. A geology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barker, 52, is Georgia-born and reared, and said his experiences moving with his family from one Appalachian cotton mill town to another as his father climbed the corporate ladder taught him that “everybody’s got something to recommend them.”