As it makes life better for its residents, Bristol should be wary of making life difficult for its visitors. In recent weeks, the local government has passed two new ordinances aimed at outsiders.

The first allows the town to levy higher taxes on rental properties. Though it applies to all rentals, including permanent residents who happen to have a landlord, the town’s real targets are outsiders who come here and stay in short-term rentals. Bristol has decided it should get a bigger slice of that economic pie.

The second is a significant expansion of residents-only overnight parking zones throughout the downtown district. To help its permanent residents, Bristol has made it more difficult to be a visitor here, especially an overnight visitor.

Though conceived separately, with good intentions for full-time residents, these new laws seem less than friendly to outsiders. They are also inconsistent with decades of marketing efforts to pitch Bristol as a great place to visit.

Bristol business associations, Explore Bristol and community groups have created events, brochures and slick marketing campaigns to attract outsiders to this magnificent coastal community. Now the message feels more like: “Come explore Bristol, enjoy its history and charm, but don’t bring your car and enjoy the higher rental fees — actually, it’s probably best you leave at the end of the day.”

The irony is that the tourist trade may be the biggest economic engine in Bristol these days. Once the home of big manufacturing and globally-renown boatbuilding, this is now the home of a multi-million-dollar, year-round wedding industry, and one of the great restaurant scenes in all of New England.

The tens of thousands of wedding guests who travel and stay in Bristol every year pump millions of dollars into local restaurants (where they pay a higher sales tax that trickles back to the town), and they buy goods and services from local businesses. These out-of-town visitors  are the type who walk to a nearby coffee shop in the morning, kill time during the day in nearby boutique shops, and take the family out for dinner at a local four-star restaurant.

Now they will find it more expensive to stay here and more difficult to stay overnight. That doesn’t sound like the type of community Bristol has been promoting for the past 25 years.