Mayor Mike Duggan said Thursday that he has appointed billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert to lead a committee to make a Super Bowl-like bid for online retail giant Amazon to bring its second North American headquarters to Detroit.

Amazon set off an interstate race for jobs last week when it announced plans to spend $5 billion over a period of 15 years building out a second headquarters consisting of 8 million square feet of office space that would be filled with 50,000 employees.

"We're up at against really tough competition and really great cities," Duggan said Thursday at Detroit Homecoming, a gathering of former Detroiters produced by Crain's Detroit Business. "But if we all pull together, we ought to take a shot."

Duggan said there's already a team of 100 people from within Gilbert's companies and city officials working on assembling a regional committee across metro Detroit to make a pitch to Amazon by the Seattle-based company's Oct. 19 deadline.

"Over the next week, we're going to flesh out a bid committee," Duggan said.

Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans and the largest downtown landlord, is expected to address the bid for Amazon when he speaks Thursday night at a Detroit Homecoming event at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, Duggan said.

Duggan said Gilbert's Bedrock Detroit LLC real estate development company has already established a "war room" at its downtown offices for the five-week sprint to meet Amazon's deadline for proposals.

"I told (Gilbert) yesterday, 'We're going to have to have a bigger room,' because we were so jammed in there," the mayor said.

Duggan told Crain's there will be teams assembled to tackle individual parts of the Amazon RFP in the areas of energy, real estate development, housing, sustainability infrastructure, job training and mass transit.

Amazon's RFP laid out a list of requirements centered on talent, mass transit and proximity to an international airport, office space and quality-of-life measures.

"There's going to be multiple teams on the bid committee," Duggan said.

Duggan said the Gilbert-led Amazon committee will be similar in size and scope as the group businessman Roger Penske formed to get the NFL Super Bowl at Ford Field in 2006.

“What Roger Penske did for this town is amazing,” said Duggan, who served on the Super Bowl XL committee. “He brought everybody together. Not only did he host a Super Bowl, he created the Downtown Detroit Partnership that laid the groundwork for a lot of what’s happening.”

The mayor declined to address how Detroit would overcome well-documented problems in the region's fractured public transportation systems.

"We're not going to talk about the specifics," he said. "We have a plan. Right now we're bringing in talent across the community to join Dan's committee, and we're going to focus on solutions."

Duggan was the opening speaker at the second day of the fourth annual Detroit Homecoming, which kicked off with a dinner Wednesday night for 400 former Detroiters and local business and civic leaders inside the long-vacant Michigan Central Station.

Thursday's conference sessions are being held at The Factory, a former hosiery factory from the early 20th Century along Michigan Avenue that sits down the road from the old train station. It is being converted into retail, office and event space by race car driver Robbie Buhl and his brother Tom Buhl.