Secure identities company HID Global broke ground Jan. 14 on its 200,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in North Austin with a goal of opening it by next January.

At a May 16 construction preview event, Jason Bohrer, HID Global's vice president and general manager of the Austin site, said a project of this size normally takes upwards of two years. However, the company wants to complete the project in just under a year and start its hiring process in fall 2013.

The new facility—which is located at 611 Center Ridge Drive behind the Tech Ridge development between Howard and Parmer lanes—will serve as HID Global's new North American Center of Operations as the company consolidates four other manufacturing facilities in Connecticut, Minnesota and California into the Austin location.

Bohrer said the shell of the building will be completed in September and the interior in December. The building will be fully operational by the third quarter of 2015. HID Global has also designed the facility to support future growth.

"This is a project that actually started over two years ago, so you're starting to see some of the fruits of our labor here in this building, but it's actually a process that started a long time ago," Bohrer said. "There's been a lot of people who have helped contribute to get us to this point."

HID Global manufactures smart cards, or ID access cards, and other secure identity solutions. The Austin facility will be the single source of operations for all HID Global's products in the Americas and the only facility to produce the entire breadth of the HID portfolio, which includes access control products, government credentials and the U.S. green card.

"The need for security is escalating all over the world," Vice President of Human Resources Michelle DeWitt said. "We have grown quite strongly, organically, and by application. We're involved in other types of security: secure IDs, government IDs [and] smart cards."

HID Global purchased 22 acres of land for its new manufacturing facility, which Dave Porter, senior vice president at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said indicates the company's vested interest in Austin.

"This is part of Opportunity Austin, our economic development plan, to diversify our regional economy [and] advance manufacturing like this," he said.

In 2014, HID Global will create 147 new jobs and another 129 jobs in 2015 with an average wage of $44,000–$53,000. Travis County Commissioner Ron Davis, whose precinct includes the land on which HID Global's new facility sits, said he was surprised the company is turning around construction so fast.

"It amazes me when we can attract this kind of diverse type of hiring mechanism in this particular part of the county which has high unemployment rates, significantly high," he said.

HID Global is slated to receive $920,576 in tax rebates from the City of Austin and $745,000 from Travis County, both over a period of 10 years, for its $35 million capital investment in the building and equipment. It also will receive $1.9 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund, which was created in 2003 with a goal of attracting businesses to the state.

Davis said collaboration, such as the state, county and city working to bring HID Global to Austin, is going to be the way of the future.

"The collaboration between public and private sector is going to have to happen," he said. "Yes, we did allow rebates, but that connectivity of private and public sector is going to be a strong marriage here in the future because that is the way we're going to have to get things done."