Wal-Mart will not be coming to Hillsboro. With four years of planning and permitting less than a month from completion, the company told town officials yesterday that for reasons of cost, it was withdrawing its plan to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter on West Main Street.

"It wasn't an easy decision for us to make due to the fact that we had so much support by the town and by elected officials," said Christopher Buchanan, senior manager of public affairs for Wal-Mart's in the Northeast. "We made recent announcements as a company that we were going to scale back a lot of our Supercenter growth, and the Hillsboro project . . . fell into that category."

In a plan released last month, Wal-Mart executives said they would scale back Supercenter development and focus on expanding and relocating existing discount stores into Supercenters, instead of building new stores. Buchanan said the decision had been reached at the company's shareholders meeting in June. The company opened or expanded 281 new Supercenters in 2007. It planned to decrease that number to 195 in 2008 and to lower it to 140 by 2010.

Buchanan stressed that the withdrawal was part of a nationwide decision. "My real estate folks are definitely taking a second look at some projects, not just in New Hampshire," he said.

Buchanan would not say how many other projects were being looked at nationally. Wal-Mart had no other expansions planned in New Hampshire. A withdrawal like this one is rare, he said. "We're not in the business of withdrawing from projects or closing stores," he said.

Yesterday, town officials said they hoped a new store would take the place of Wal-Mart. "Even though it's very disappointing, I see it as an opportunity for someone to come in to do business in Hillsboro because Wal-Mart did a lot of the hard work," said Matt Taylor, planning director for the town.

The four-year process has been fraught with conflict. From the time Wal-Mart started looking at the site, at the end of 2003, small-business owners worried Wal-Mart would take away their customers. Some residents complained about the prospect of more traffic, uncontrolled growth and increased costs to town resources, such as the police department.

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