New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will not only be looking for consultants and contractors from overseas to handle its upcoming wave of mass transit construction projects but also may be spanning the globe for labor as well.

Mysore Nagaraja, president of the agency’s Capital Construction Co. division, says his agency is taking a global view when it comes to assessing the capacity of the heavy construction sector to handle the more than $3 billion in work it expects to launch this year.

“My recommendation to contractors and consultants in the area is that we really have to look at partnering with some international companies,” he says. “I just finished speaking with a Japanese company, and they like many others are interested in coming here. They have the resources.”

Nagaraja’s comments grew out of an exchange that took place last Friday an industry breakfast forum hosted by the New York Building Congress at which he gave an update on the $6.3-billion East Side Access program and other MTA projects. The massive East Side program, which will bring Long Island Railroad trains into Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, is set for a flurry of contract awards and construction starts this year.

The forum featured comments from an industry panel, including Carl Cosenzo, executive vice president of Schiavone Construction of Secaucus, N.J., a frequent contractor on MTA mass transit projects. He questioned whether the MTA was giving the local “sandhog” community enough time to train an adequate number of tradesworkers. “I think it’s to the TA’s interest to space it out a little bit,” Cosenzo says. “I suggested that the TA push out the Queens soft ground tunnel project to give the unions time to train their crews.”

Cosenzo was referring to one of three awards that the MTA is planning to issue this year for the massive tunnel-boring, cavern-carving, multi-structure construction effort on East Side Access. The awards would amount to $1 billion worth of work on top of $500 million in contracts awarded in 2006 for the East Side program, which is slated for completion in 2013.

“The training process takes a long time,” Cosenzo says. “If you rush, you have people not as trained, not as efficient, not as safe. Not to mention, it creates wage pressure for the more experienced sandhogs.” But the MTA says it expects to find needed resources from a global pool.

Last year, Nagaraja applauded the winning joint venture for a $428-million tunneling contract for East Side Access between Dragados USA, a unit of Madrid-based ACS, and Judlau Contracting of College Point, N.Y. He says he has since met with French, German, and Chinese contractors with modern tunneling expertise that are all interested in signing on to MTA projects as joint venture partners or subcontractors.

Now, he says that same equation that penciled out for bringing in an international contractor with extensive tunneling resources can extend to the labor picture. He says these firms can bring labor foremen and superintendents to the area as well as enroll experienced TBM trades workers from other parts of the world in New York-area union apprenticeship or training programs.

“If you need more trades people, let’s start more training programs,” he says. “You can phase them in.”

Nagaraja says the industry should not pass up the opportunity to take on billions of dollars in construction, particularly because any delays could be fatal to the projects. “We have to increase that pool,” he says. “The money is not going to wait for these projects.”

East Side Access will have a busy slate this year, starting with a change in the project’s leadership. Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco, which has been in a program management consulting joint venture with URS of San Francisco on East Side Access since 1998, is pulling out of the team.

The change will result in little turmoil because most of the Bechtel project team on the effort is simply going to work for URS instead, Nagaraja says.

“We’re not going to lose anything,” he says. “As far as the project is concerned, we don’t even feel it.”

The impetus was a change in MTA’s project scope, says Howard Menaker, manager of public affairs out of Bechtel’s Washington, D.C., office.

“Basically, MTA reorganized the scope and we are no longer providing the project management services we had been providing,” he says. “We have a very good relationship with the MTA. We’re helping the MTA transition that role to URS.”

URS and MTA offered different explanations for the change from Bechtel, however. Nagaraja says he understands that Bechtel is simply now interested in pursuing public-private partnership projects in the mass transit area. And Howard Sackel, head of the national transit business line for URS, says he had been told Bechtel is “taking its business model in a different direction. They were not interested the types of services we are providing on East Side Access anymore.”

East Side Access is also primed for work to start on the Dragados-Judlau contract, which awaits the arrival of two new TBM units that Dragados is having fabricated for the four-tube, 1-mi dig from the East 63rd Street tunnel under the East River over to Grand Central. The first unit is set to arrive in May.

The other contracts set for award this year are: a $300 million, five-tunnel TBM dig on the Queens side of the East 63rd Street tunnel, which will be the funneling point for LIRR trains entering and exiting Manhattan; a $100 million contract also taking place in the Queens yards to build roads, retaining walls, and substations; and the $600 million construction manager segment that will oversee drilling and blasting for the new LIRR platforms and station beneath Grand Central in Manhattan, as well as the creation of escalator and elevator shafts.

A $90-million open-cut excavation contract being handled by Pile Foundation of Hicksville is already under way on the Queens side to help prepare for the five-tunnel TBM dig.