Toronto city manager Joe Pennachetti is stepping down at the end of November after six years as the top civil servant for the country’s sixth-largest government.

Pennachetti, a soft-spoken accountant often described as unflappable, is hailed by councillors of all political stripes for bringing stability to the 35,000-employee bureaucracy during the tumultuous tenure of Mayor Rob Ford.

He quietly influenced city policy as city manager under Ford and David Miller, who elevated him in 2008, and as chief financial officer under Miller and Mel Lastman, who hired him in 2002 from the government of Peel.

Pennachetti helped secure billions in transit funding from the provincial government, find tens of millions of annual savings, and maintain a strong municipal credit rating. Councillor Gord Perks, a Ford critic, said he “held the city together during a completely collapsed and incompetent mayoralty.”

Pennachetti became city manager during the global financial crisis. In his inaugural speech to employees, Perks recalled, he told them their job was to make sure the social safety net might bend but wouldn’t break.

“It’s always touched me that a guy who’s a finance guy who imagines you can run the city on a spreadsheet — you should see his spreadsheets — thought the duty of the public service was to make sure that in the middle of a financial crisis, the most vulnerable residents didn’t suffer,” Perks said.

Many of Pennachetti’s achievements were the kinds of changes few residents noticed. In 2009, for example, he spoke enthusiastically to an accounting publication about the “groundbreaking” Miller-era initiative to fund solid waste operations solely with user fees rather than with property taxes as well.

Pennachetti has become noticeably more outspoken than usual in the last year. He has said that the city needs new taxes, that he opposed the council decision to cancel the vehicle registration tax, that there are no more cuts to be made without hurting services, and that the TCHC’s repair backlog could force some tenants out of their units if not addressed.

He was publicly inscrutable for much of his career, frustrating journalists and councillors. Councillor Joe Mihevc, laughing, called him “chameleon-like enough that you read the answer that you hope for in his responses.”

“Joe was not your take-charge, alpha leader — he is, by character, someone who everyone can live with and do well with,” Mihevc said. “And he may just have been the ideal person to survive the Ford era given his personality, his flexibility — which sometimes drives some of us crazy who want a more clear and unambiguous positioning from the city manager, but at the end of the day, all issues in, I think that character allowed a civil service that was under tremendous stress the last four years to survive.”

Pennachetti made $363,234 in 2013. In 2009, he told the accounting publication, Statements, that his personality “somewhat reflects” his profession “in that we are trained to always keep in mind every aspect of any issue in which we are involved.”

Pennachetti is in his 60s. Councillor Paul Ainslie said, “If he is retiring — I would like him to stay. I think he’s too young to retire.”

The election is Oct. 27. The new council takes office at the beginning of December.