EL PASO, Texas -- It's deja vu all over again as El Paso Mental Health and Mental Retardation goes to El Paso County Commissioners Court on Monday pleading for desperately needed funding.

The CEO of MHMR, Gary Larcenaire, said he hasn't received any of the more than $1.5 million promised to him by the county, and some county leaders say that's because they haven't signed a contract with MHMR yet.

If MHMR doesn't get funding from the county, mental health patients will go on a waiting list and won't get any medication.

"We do need to keep funding this for another 30 days to insure that no one is going to fall through the cracks," said El Paso County Judge Anthony Cobos.

In a 3-to-1 vote Monday morning, County Commissioner approved $156,000 to keep MHMR running at full strength for the next month.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we're preventing a lot of those emergency type situations by continuing the funding," said Cobos.

The funding didn't come through before Monday because the county and MHMR are trying to work out a contract which includes going through thousands of pages of documents.

"What we want is to just go ahead and fund medications, fund services temporarily while the due diligence is completed, while all the effort is completed to read these documents that we've submitted already," said Larcenaire.

"This is a good example of the way county government should not work," said County Commissioner Anna Perez.

Perez was the one person who voted against the funding, saying a contract is desperately needed before any money is handed out.

"We do this without any kind of contract to guide not only MHMR's obligations, but the county's obligations, is a bad business practice," Perez told KFOX.

Perez said instead, the county should speed up the information gathering and contract building process.

"When we're doing business without a contract, and we're not answering the questions that need to be asked, how is that good government? How is that good county efficiency?" she said.

Perez said some of her questions include why MHMR has had to return hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding related to Medicare billing rates, among other issues.