My most humble replies for my shoddy writing on the problem statement.
I guess I need to slow down when I'm posting to make this make some sense.
However, the first reply hit the problem. I didn't realize that the TMPL_VAR "contig" wasn't being defined in the last script that ran prior to the template.
So I then altered that perl script to define it based on what was passed to it and all was good.
I'll try to be more clear next time I fumble in perl.