Richard W. Roper retired as a senior executive at the Port Authority of NY & NJ. He was also president of The Roper Group, a public policy consulting firm specializing in economic and social policy research and analysis.


He has held positions on staff at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and worked for the Carter Administration as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce (Juanita Kreps) and as director of the Department’s Office of State and Local Government Assistance.


Roper was director of the Office of Newark Metropolitan Studies; the Legislative Aide to Newark’s first African-American Mayor, Kenneth Gibson; a special assistant to the director of the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services; an education program director at the Greater Newark Urban Coalition, and assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education.


He was a founding trustee of Newark Emergency Services for Families, a co-founder of the New Jersey Public Policy Research Institute, Inc., New Jersey Future and Leadership Newark. In addition, he was a founding trustee of Newark Public Radio, the New Jersey Institute of Social Justice, and University Heights Charter School.
Roper is on the board of the Brick City Development Corporation; a trustee of the Fund for New Jersey, Vice President of La Casa de Don Pedro; a Trustee of the NJ Institute for Social Justice and a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct.