When you say the BEGIN is probably not needed, I interpret your statement to mean that the BEGIN may not be necessary because the OP probably will not have to initialize his block scoped variables.

Most code I've seen is organized such that initialization statements come before others. I meant BEGIN is probably not needed because the code is probably already executed in the right order without it.

If my understanding is incorrect, is there some other mechanism that you suggest for initializing the variables?

No, BEGIN is just fine. Like I said, even if it's not needed, there's no harm. For example, when I have an inlined module, I do

BEGIN {
   package ...;

   ...
}
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The BEGIN is rarely needed there, but it has avoided problem in the past. There's no cost to adding the word BEGIN, especially since I already had curlies in place to limit the scope of package and any my and our vars.