If you provide accessor/mutator functions to get at your variables, inheritance will work

That would mean the function-with-local-variable solution. Aren't local variables initialized each time the sub is called?

I forgot to mention that this list is private and constant class data, which is only used in its package. They are used for steering access to a different combination of database tables for each specialized class. That db design is not my work, but I have to live with it.