Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) has sure had a busy start to his autumn. First, he came to the defense of disabled Segway riders who wanted to ride on the sidewalk. Then, he battled the oppressive governmental restrictions on raising chickens in your backyard. Now, all he has to do is work around the District’s $20 million reduction in funding for homeless services in the budget for fiscal year 2010, a move that could be quite problematic for the District’s network of homeless shelters and service providers.

I guess he got the easy stuff out of the way first.

Wells, the chair of the Council’s Human Services Committee, told the Post that the reductions in funding “undercuts the relationship we’ve developed with the community,” and that he “was taken by surprise” by the cuts. (Another feather in the cap for the already-under-fire Fenty administration, eh?) Wells has reason to be angry — in an effort to reduce a nearly $800 million deficit, human services funding took the biggest hit [PDF]: the $49 million cut in that area of the budget is as much as was removed from economic development, public safety, public works, and other financing combined.

During a time when D.C.’s unemployment rate has spiked over the eleven percent mark, such loss of services on the city could be devastating. Several nonprofits serving the community — including, as we reported on Friday, the House of Ruth, which faces a $500,000 deficit thanks to the cuts — are now faced with quickly raising very large sums of money or face the unpleasant thought of closing their doors to those in need.

It should be noted that human support services, even with the reductions, still comprises the largest slice of the general 2010 budget at $1.5 billion [PDF], which is about one quarter of all planned expenditures. Wells will shift the focus of a planned Monday committee hearing to inquire as to why the reductions were so dramatic — we’ll be intrigued to hear what sort of justifications that human services officials come up with.