  In US State government legislatures, most of the activity occurs in
committees made up of lawmakers discussing bills. When analyzing, classifying
or summarizing these committee proceedings, some important features become
broadly interesting. In this paper, we engineer four useful features, two
applying to lawmakers (engagement and absence), and two to non-lawmakers
(stance and affiliation). We propose a system to automatically track the
affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational
representative supports or opposes the bill. The model tracking affiliation
achieves an F1 of 0.872 while the support determination has an F1 of 0.979.
Additionally, a metric to compute legislator engagement and absenteeism is also
proposed and as proof-of-concept, a list of the most and least engaged
legislators over one full California legislative session is presented.
