Pasco County · Sixth Judicial Circuit

Pasco County Construction Expert Witnesses

Delay, disruption, termination, construction defects and first-party claims.

Schedule and delay analysis for public works, residential growth, utility and transportation projects in Pasco County, from our Clearwater office, about 29 miles by road from the West Pasco Judicial Center in New Port Richey.

Pasco County sits immediately north of Pinellas and Hillsborough. Much of its recent construction has been growth work: new residential communities and the roads, utilities and schools that serve them, especially around Wesley Chapel and Land O' Lakes, together with redevelopment and public work in New Port Richey, Port Richey, Dade City and Zephyrhills, and coastal construction along the west side of the county. On projects like these, the schedule often depends as much on site work, utilities and approvals as on vertical construction.

Oxley's office is at 13830 58th St N, Suite 403, Clearwater, FL 33760, about 29 miles by road from the West Pasco Judicial Center in New Port Richey and about 55 miles from the Robert D. Sumner Judicial Center in Dade City. Daniel R. Zorrilla, J.D., BSBC, CGC, CFCC, leads the analysis and gives the testimony. Pasco and Pinellas counties form Florida's Sixth Judicial Circuit, so a Pasco matter is heard in the same circuit as our home office.

Owners and developers: schedule reviews while the project is running, including work described on the construction schedule consultant page.

Contractors: time questions on a live project are easier to analyze while the records are current. The analysis addresses what the schedule and records show.

Public owners and the contracts they use

Public owners active in the county include the Pasco County government, the Cities of New Port Richey, Port Richey, Dade City and Zephyrhills, Pasco County Schools and FDOT District Seven, which serves Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties from its Tampa headquarters. They are named to describe the county's construction market, not as Oxley clients.

Public contracts tend to share features that drive delay disputes:

Detailed schedule specifications that set the baseline, the update cycle and what a time extension request must contain
Notice and claim deadlines tied to the schedule submittals
Liquidated damages for late completion and milestone dates
Change order and payment processes that can affect the contractor's cash flow and sequence

Whether a time request satisfied the contract is a question for counsel and the tribunal. What we can show is what the schedule, the updates and the record support about the time itself.

Help for owners as well as contractors

Many disputes can be narrowed before they start. Oxley works on both sides of the schedule, never for both parties on the same project:

For public owners and developers: help with schedule specifications, baseline review, TIA review and extension-of-time analysis.
For contractors and subcontractors: baseline schedules, updates, time impact analyses and requests for equitable adjustment.
For counsel: forensic delay analysis, rebuttal of an opposing expert, and testimony.

Courts serving Pasco County

State court: Sixth Judicial Circuit (Pinellas and Pasco). In Pasco County, circuit and county matters are heard at the West Pasco Judicial Center, 7530 Little Road, New Port Richey, and at the Robert D. Sumner Judicial Center, 38053 Live Oak Avenue, Dade City. Each location has a civil mediation office.

Federal court: Middle District of Florida, Tampa Division, Sam M. Gibbons U.S. Courthouse, 801 N. Florida Ave., Tampa, which includes Pasco County in its division.

Appeals: Florida's Second District Court of Appeal, headquartered in St. Petersburg, for state cases, and the Eleventh Circuit for federal cases.

In every forum, the delay opinion has to rest on a stated method. Depending on the records, that may be a windows analysis, an as-planned versus as-built comparison, a retrospective time impact analysis or an as-built reconstruction, consistent with AACE International Recommended Practice No. 29R-03. The analysis also addresses whether delays were concurrent on the critical path. How concurrent delay is treated depends on the contract and applicable law, which are for counsel and the tribunal.

Selected project experience

Daniel R. Zorrilla's Florida work includes projects he managed for general contractors and later consulting and expert assignments. Consulting and expert work is described by project and issue type only.

From 2005 to 2008, he was a senior project manager in the Tampa office of Hardin Construction (acquired by DPR Construction in 2013), managing construction of a $28 million condominium in Tampa and a $124 million resort in Puerto Rico.

Projects managed.

Ventana condominium, Tampa. Senior Project Manager.
Regatta condominiums, North Beach (Miami-Dade). Project Manager.
The Park at Riverbridge, West Palm Beach. Project Manager.
Westin Sarasota hotel and Vue Sarasota condominium (Senior Project Manager for the general contractor).
Porto Bellagio condominiums, Sunny Isles Beach. Assistant Project Manager.

Infrastructure, utilities and growth-area schedules

Linear and utility projects, and the site work that precedes a new community, behave differently from a single building. A road widening is often scheduled by segment and traffic phase, a plant or pipeline by system and tie-in outage, and a master-planned community by phases that depend on each other. Delays come from utility relocations, right-of-way, permits, design changes and weather, and the critical path can move between segments or phases. The analysis has to follow those shifts with the contemporaneous updates, not with a single summary of the whole job.

Dan's project experience includes infrastructure, highways and bridges, airports, levees and federal facilities as well as buildings. David Hengelbrok, P.E., PSP, and Jeremy Easen, CGC, support the scheduling work.

Who you would work with

Daniel R. Zorrilla, J.D., BSBC, CGC, CFCC, leads the work and testifies. He has worked in construction consulting and expert work since 2008, with a return to project management in 2014–2015, and has testified in more than 40 cases. He has been retained as a consultant or expert in more than 100 construction matters. He is a Florida Supreme Court Certified County and Circuit Court Mediator (Florida Courts mediator lookup). He is a member of The Florida Bar and does not practice law.

Scheduling support comes from David Hengelbrok, P.E., PSP, and Jeremy Easen, CGC. We act for only one party on a project, and fees do not depend on findings. Dan's full profile →

Conflicts are checked first; please send only party names and a short nonconfidential description until we confirm.