The $600,000 cut in state funding that the Butler County Medical Assistance Transportation Program must endure for 2011-12 is unfortunate. It will make the program’s job more difficult.

But from the perspective of taxpayers, the reduction to $2 million from $2.6 million can be viewed as not a traumatic development. Such programs should have to periodically take a close look at their operations and expenses, with the goal of implementing efficiencies that they might have been overlooking.

The fact that the current examination is being forced by the state’s fiscal problems — problems that aren’t likely to be resolved in just one or two years — means the local transportation program will have to ensure that the efficiencies for which it opts are capable of meeting financial challenges over the long run.

Janine Kennedy, director of Butler County Community Action, said she and the Alliance for Nonprofit Resources (ANR), the agency contracted to operate the transportation program, are considering ways to reduce expenses, such as by having fewer trips through better coordination of rides.

That is the kind of intense cost-saving analysis that could have been done in the past but wasn’t, due to the availability of needed money. The study under way has the potential to not only help the transportation program achieve the needed savings, but perhaps will be able to produce modest additional savings.

There’s no evidence, nor have there been allegations, that the program has been intentionally wasting money. But agencies and programs, while caught up in their day-to-day operations, oftentimes fail to notice how things can be done differently, and more cost-effectively.

So, while the local program — and others statewide — are scrambling to address the funding cutback, taxpayers can feel upbeat about the savings that will result and what they will mean in terms of lightening the state’s fiscal burden.

According to an article in Friday’s Butler Eagle, medical assistance transportation served 2,150 county residents in the 2010-11 fiscal year.

It will continue to serve those as well as new program participants during the new fiscal year now under way.

But the bottom line is that a funding cut does not necessarily have to be regarded as disastrous.

This one doesn’t seem to be.