An upstate village may proceed with a controversial plan to lure white-tailed deer with food to locations where sharpshooters or bow hunters will kill most of them, a state judge has decided.

Ruling that an environmental impact statement prepared for the “bait-and-shoot” approach to thinning the deer herd was neither arbitrary nor capricious, Justice Phillip R. Rumsey (See Profile), sitting in Tompkins County Supreme Court, refused to block the action in an Article 78 proceeding.