Dru, as a datapoint for your manager, I managed a big (80,000KLOC, 10+ developers) Perl project for a year. During that time we had zero (0) questions that couldn't be answered by either referring to one of the standard books or by doing a web search. Tech support for us was a non-issue. And we were doing some moderately complicated stuff, involving sockets, web protocols, and DBI.

If your manager insists on having someone there to throw money at, I'm sure merlyn would be more than happy, though I'm sure that funneling some cash into the Offering Plate would be appreciated.