Richard W. Roper

Richard W. Roper is a public-policy consultant who has held senior-level positions in local, state, regional, and federal government agencies and has had experience in nonprofit organizations, private consulting, and academic research, teaching, and administration. He served as a senior executive at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, from which he retired as director of the agency’s Planning Department in 2010.  Roper is a member of the board of trustees of the Fund for New Jersey; a member of the Rutgers-Newark Advisory Board, trustee of La Casa de Don Pedro, a Newark-based community-development corporation; a director of the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, and a Visiting Associate at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.   He is co-editor with Robert Holmes of: A Mayor for All the People: Kenneth Gibson’s Newark, a book published in 2019 by Rutgers University Press that features reflections on the 16-year tenure of Ken Gibson, Newark’s first African American mayor.