(Radio Iowa) – The three member state panel that sets the estimate of state tax collections lawmakers use to draft the state budget has just two members today. David Underwood, a C-P-A from Clear Lake, has retired from the Revenue Estimating Conference.  “I started this in another century and that really seems like a long time,” Underwood said last Wednesday, “but I have spent about a third of my life serving on this committee.”

Underwood was appointed to the Revenue Estimating Conference by Governor Terry Branstad — in September of 1997. For the past 26 years, he’s primarily been a mediator between tax estimates from the executive and legislative branches of state government.

“People kind of warned me in the beginning that I was probably going to get a lot of political pressure,” Underwood says. “I never did.” State law says the two other members of the panel, one appointed by the governor and one employed by the legislative branch, will choose Underwood’s replacement.

Underwood was the chief financial officer of a Mason City company that makes doors and windows when he was appointed to the Revenue Estimating Conference. After retiring from that job, he became a business consultant.