BENNINGTON, Vt. (AP) – Wal-Mart scored an easy victory Tuesday as voters rejected a town bylaw that limited the size of big-box retailers to 75,000 square feet.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. opened its first Vermont store in Bennington 10 years ago and now wants to more than double its size from 50,000 to 112,000 square feet. That request bumped up against a bylaw, unanimously approved by the town Select Board in December, that imposed the smaller cap.

Supporters of the cap said they thought the vote would be very close, but in the end it proved not to be.

The bylaw was rejected 2,189-1,724. The turnout was 40 percent of the 9,650 registered voters, a heavy turnout for a special election.

The victory for Wal-Mart and the developer that owns the land where its Bennington store sits came after heavy advertising in town by the developer, Ohio-based Redstone Investments.

Campaign workers distributed thousands of postcard-sized handbills urging a “No” vote and the anti-cap campaign ran radio ads in the days leading up to the special vote.

Their message resonated.

“I want a bigger Wal-Mart,” said Jessica Caron, a 26-year-old mother of three and clerk at the Mobil gas station next door to the existing store. She said she’d been to a larger Wal-Mart in New Hampshire. “Instead of four racks of clothes, they had 20 racks of clothes,” she said.

It was a political science case study in the give-and-take between small R-republican and small-D democratic forms of government. In republican fashion, elected leaders – the Planning Commission and Select Board – both studied the issue at length and unanimously supported the cap.

Then cap opponents kicked the democratic process into gear by collecting more than 1,000 signatures to put the question to a townwide vote.

“There’s a check and a balance,” Town Clerk Tim Corcoran said after the vote. “Every once in a while the people don’t agree with their elected leaders. … I think on this there was a sentiment out there that didn’t speak out (at board hearings) or wasn’t being heard.”

Bennington’s debate may seem quaint in some parts of the country. In California, the question in several cities is whether to allow Wal-Mart to build what it calls Supercenters at 200,000 square feet. That’s more than four football fields of retail space.

But, in 1993, two years before the Bennington Wal-Mart opened, the National Trust For Historic Preservation put the entire state of Vermont on its list of the “10 most endangered places,” proclaiming the state was endangered by a phenomenon it called “Sprawl-Mart.”

Vermont made the list again last year when the National Trust said its “special magic” of historic villages and bucolic countryside faced “an invasion of behemoth stores that could destroy much of what makes Vermont Vermont.”

Bruce Laumeister saw the photo-finishing business he founded more than two decades ago in Bennington grow to 26 stores in four New England states and then shrink to 15, mainly due to cut-rate competition from big-box retailers.

Eventually, he had to close what had been his biggest store, in Keene, N.H.

“Closing that store broke my heart,” Laumeister said.

Wal-Mart has come under scrutiny around the country for its effects on everything from its labor practices to the health of other businesses in town and the traffic its stores generate. Last month, the company agreed to pay a record $11 million to settle federal allegations it used hundreds of illegal immigrants to clean the floors at its stores in 21 states.

Wal-Mart has had some success in California and elsewhere defeating local officials’ efforts to limit its size by putting the issue to a referendum.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, people on both sides of the debate insist it’s not just about Wal-Mart. “It’s about the character of Bennington,” Town Manager Stuart Hurd said.