Edward G. Guedes, with Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman

Bad news for some Florida drivers from the Third District Court of Appeal. The red-light cameras, which capture photographs of drivers violating traffic laws, are here to stay in Florida.

That's also bad news for Daniel A. Gonzalez, a  lawyer for The Ticket Clinic in Miami.

Opposing counsel say Gonzalez has electronically filed about 10,000 motions to dismiss for Florida drivers that have received citations based upon photographs taken by red-light cameras.

"It is the same motion over and over and over," said Edward G. Guedes, a partner at Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman in Miami, who represented the City of Aventura. "The only thing that changes is the name of the violator, the case number, some basic information, but the motion itself is the same and regenerated."

But now, the Third DCA ruling changes things, after plaintiff Lee Stein, represented by Louis Arslanian of The Ticket Clinic in Miami, contested a red-light ticket issued by the City of Aventura in August 2014.

Instead of challenging the validity of an image allegedly showing Stein failing to stop at a red traffic signal, Arslanian argued that red-light traffic cameras violated a uniformity requirement.

The Miami-Dade Circuit Court ruled in Stein's favor. However, the Third DCA overruled that decision Wednesday, finding that a prior decision from the Florida Supreme Court upheld the same red-light guidelines utilized by the City of Aventura — the ones Stein challenged in this case.

"This ruling affects any red-light camera program in the state of Florida," Guedes said. "This decision says that the way the red-light program is operating statewide is entirely lawful. It gives no basis to think any red-light program should be suspended or terminated."

Read the Third DCA opinion:

The Third DCA stated in its opinion that each city gave instructions to its red-light vendor regarding the contractual task of sorting all the camera images that are collected. The appellate court found that there could be variations in traffic enforcement levels resulting from different cities employing different benchmarks as to which violations would get ticketed.

"These variations reflect different balances struck by different communities in the unavoidable tradeoff between allocating limited local police resources and establishing an acceptable level of local enforcement of a particular law," the Third DCA opinion stated.

The Third DCA's conclusion was that these variances in the enforcement of traffic laws do not violate the state law requirement under Chap. 316 that traffic laws be administered in a uniform manner, and are not actionable by someone who has been ticketed.

For Miami-Dade County Court Judge Steven Leifman, the only judge who handles red light camera cases, the decision will significantly unclog the system, which has seen thousands of motions to dismiss filed by The Ticket Clinic.

Arslanian said those "hundreds, thousands, of cases with the same issue" are likely to get dismissed because of the result on this test case.

Arslanian is now planning to ask the Third DCA to reconsider its decision, or to request that the Florida Supreme Court review the case.

"We filed that same motion in every one of those cases," Arslanian said. "And depending upon how the Third [DCA] ruled, would decide what would happen."