A moratorium for certain types of development was imposed in the central part of Issaquah, allowing city officials to halt new construction and give themselves time to recalibrate their design and building standards — particularly to make sure whatever project came next would be something the city would actually want around for decades to come.

“It caused [the city council] to go: ‘Wait a second. Time out. I don’t think we got this right,’ ” recalled Keith Niven, Issaquah’s economic development and development services director.

Issaquah’s is just one example in recent years of a city in the Puget Sound region giving itself such a breather amid the waves of relentless development that have emanated from Seattle’s growth.

At one point last fall, King County alone had five cities — including Issaquah — with a building moratorium in effect to temporarily halt some forms of development for one reason or another. Currently, there are at least a handful of active moratoriums across the Puget Sound region. The moratoriums stretch from Gig Harbor in Pierce County to Granite Falls in central Snohomish County.

For the cities that enact such temporary bans on growth, the policies provide a chance to revisit and update local codes and zoning ordinances to make sure future development is in line with a community’s vision of itself.

But some experts in land-use laws and advocates for builders argue that moratoriums don’t come without consequence. They dissuade businesses and developers from investing in a community and increase costs by delaying projects not yet in a city’s permitting pipeline. They also, in critics’ eyes, carry the potential to be easily abused as a means to mask anti-growth attitudes in communities not accustomed to their new reality in an urbanized region.

Under Washington’s Growth Management Act, cities can adopt moratoriums only under very narrow circumstances, generally only when something constitutes an emergency likely to cause harm to the community.

“The general rule, in the U.S., is that moratoria are OK; they’re legal — if reasonable in scope and time,” said Charles R. Wolfe, a Seattle land-use lawyer and author who has taught planning law at the University of Washington for 20 years. (Wolfe was previously a contributor to Crosscut from 2009 to 2015, writing under the byline of Chuck Wolfe).

Washington state law limits moratoriums to six months, but they can be renewed in additional six-month increments if local elected leaders determine the emergency still merits one or if further study is required to address the problem.

“When there’s so much change going on within a given market or submarket, it’s an opportunity to say: ‘Wait a minute, we don’t know if we have the regulatory capacity to deal with this,’ ” Wolfe said. “It allows some pause.”

In rare cases, a moratorium is a necessity, literally.

That’s pretty much the case in rural Granite Falls in Snohomish County, about 13 miles northeast of Everett. City Council members in the town of 3,500 people recently imposed a six-month moratorium on most new connections to the city’s sewer system, because the system itself is almost at capacity.

In seeking the council’s approval last month, city staff wrote that the wastewater treatment plant had capacity to serve only 643 more residential units when, as of March, there were already 553 units in the permitting pipeline to be built. The city simply wouldn’t have the ability to handle further development at such a pace without increasing its sewer capacity.

Other cities have offered different impacts of growth to justify a moratorium.

Sammamish cited traffic impacts in imposing temporary development restrictions in December. In halting new building permits, the Bainbridge Island City Council in January said rapid development and deforestation were threatening its fresh water aquifers, the Kitsap Sun reported.

For some communities — like Issaquah, Federal Way or Gig Harbor — the moratoriums appear to stem more out of a community desire to maintain the character of once-small, detached suburbs, where many Seattleites are now flocking as they seek a quality of life that’s more affordable.

Federal Way put the brakes on building more apartment complexes in June 2016 with a moratorium that officially lasted about a year. Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell said the genesis for the emergency measure was the influx of apartment units at such a brisk pace and in such volume that it not only ruffled longtime residents but also overburdened local schools.

“This was like a tsunami that was slowly in the making, and before the community really had a chance to absorb this, the next thing you know we had nearly 1,000 units that came online rapidly,” Ferrell recalled.