Here's some pseudo-psuedocode that represents what I am doing to share a DBI handle among my local modules.

unless ($local_package::dbh) { $local_package::dbh = [DBI connect stri
+ng] or die [DBI error] };
my $dbh = $local_package::dbh;
[download]

I put these two lines in every module, like local_package::do_this and local_package::do_that. It may not be the optimal solution, but it (works | appears to work) for me.