I forwarded my original post to the author via http://rt.cpan.org, and got back that he thinks this is fixed in 1.11. So that is in agreement with your assessment - I just have to convince the infrastructure team to move up. In the meantime, I have a workaround that works.

BTW - your output will be different based on your timezone. I am using timelocal, afterall, and not timegm ;-)