A Palm Beach County judge has thrown out a Wellington school-zone speed camera ticket because the camera system never received approval from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, CBS12 News reported on Oct. 20. Without the state’s sign-off, the judge found, the camera’s speed reading couldn’t be used in court. Without the reading, there was no proof the driver was speeding.
The decision covers one driver. The judge did not find that Wellington’s cameras measured anyone’s speed wrong, and no camera has to come down. But the argument that won applies well beyond one village. As of September 2025, 34 Florida jurisdictions were running 646 school-zone speed cameras, according to the department’s own December 2025 summary report. The weak spot the judge found sits in the state law that authorized all of them, and it comes from how lawmakers wrote one exemption in 2023.
Florida’s two rulebooks for speed-measuring devices
Florida regulated speed-measuring equipment long before anyone bolted a camera to a pole near a school. Section 316.1905(1) of the Florida Statutes says any electronic, mechanical or other device a peace officer uses to determine a vehicle’s speed “shall be of a type approved by the department” and must be tested for accuracy at least once every six months, under procedures the department sets. The department is DHSMV. It handles approvals under Rule Chapter 15B-2 of the Florida Administrative Code, and its public list of approved speed-measuring devices reads like the trunk inventory of a Highway Patrol cruiser: Stalker radar and lidar units, Kustom Signals, several LTI 20/20 models, DragonEye. I found no Jenoptik product on that page. Jenoptik is the company Wellington names as its camera vendor on the village’s School Zone Safety Program page…