Just five days after transit workers narrowly defeated a contract proposal negotiated at the height of the paralyzing three-day strike last December, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday submitted a request to a state agency for binding arbitration, MTA officials said.

If the Public Employee Relations Board determines that an impasse has been reached, a panel of three arbitrators chosen by the union and the MTA will convene and create a binding contract, putting an end to the lengthy dispute. The secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, Ed Watt, said the union will do everything it can to resist binding arbitration.

Reading from a statement, the chairman of the MTA board, Peter Kalikow, reiterated that the MTA is upset the transit workers rejected a contract that took hundreds of hours of negotiations, but said he is ready to meet with the union.

Mr. Kalikow warned that the MTA’s financial constraints make it impossible to offer the union much more than what was in the preliminary agreement.

In the proposal negotiated during the first system-wide transit strike in more than 25 years, the president of Local 100, Roger Toussaint, agreed to require workers to pay 1.5% of their health care premiums but convinced the MTA to drop its demand that the retirement age be raised to 62 from 55. The members would have received wage increases of 3%,4%, and 3.5% over the next three years. The union also succeeded in getting the MTA to refund about $110 million in pension payments to more than 20,000 workers who paid additional fees in the 1990s to a since discarded program.

Sporting a “Vote No” button, a vice president of Local 100, Marty Goodman, who has criticized Mr. Toussaint in the past, took a hard line against the original contract proposal while addressing the MTA board during the public comment period yesterday. “We don’t want a contract booby-trapped with givebacks,” he said.

Outside the meeting room, Mr. Watt, who was excluded, because of his position with the union, from the closed-door session at which the MTA board discussed the pending negotiation, said the first step in restoring the unity of the union in the next round is for certain members of the union’s executive board to take responsibility for their actions. The board had voted 37-4, with one abstention and four members not voting, to approve and send the contract to the membership.

But Mr. Watt said the vice president for rapid transit operations, Randy Nevels, and the chairman of transit authority buses, William Pelletier, though among those voting to send the contract to the members, “ironically” went on to tell them not to vote for it.

The dissidents “care more about a divided union than a contract,” Mr. Watt said. Messrs. Nevels and Pelletier denied the allegations yesterday. “He lied,” Mr. Nevels said. “I voted for the contract … but I was not going to go out and tell people to vote for it just because I did.”

Mr. Nevels said he thought the preliminary contract agreement had “many great things,” but he said he understood why the majority of members voted against it: the mandatory payment of 1.5% of health care premiums, which he said hurt younger workers and people working overtime the most.

Mr. Pelletier said his vote to send the contract to the members didn’t mean he couldn’t answer questions about the contract honestly. “A good contract sells itself,” he said. “You don’t have to tell anybody to do anything.”

Mr. Nevels portrayed the post-strike union as sharply divided, top-heavy, and lacking a strategy. “We’re between a rock and a hard place – no contract and six days’ fines. Who knows what’s going to happen when they to go to an arbitrator,” Mr. Nevels said. “We don’t have any leverage.”

The union’s 46-member board has scheduled its first full meeting since the end of the strike for next Tuesday.

Declaring an impasse between the two sides could take the PERB about 10 days, according to the MTA, after which arbitration would begin. The next phase could take several months more, as the two sides pick the members of the arbitration panel and make contract presentations. The panel’s final decision would be binding on the union’s membership, which would not have the chance to vote on the final contract.