Yeah the class methods don't jive with mod_perl at that level... but Exporter was spot on. I guess all this time I had been using it to import functions I never considered that it truly places them in the 'use'rs namespace. That's awesome and exactly what I needed. For anyone else that stumbles on this post in the future I ended up with something like:

package Basehandler;
BEGIN
  {
  use Exporter;
  our @ISA = qw (Exporter);
  our @EXPORT = qw (handler .... setup_environment );
  }

use Module::I::Always::Use::1;
  ...
use Module::I::Always::Use::35;

sub handler
  {
  ...  same 50 lines of code that do validation and then a jump table 
+to my real work functions ...
  }

sub setup_environment
  {
  ....
  }

-- MyHandler/ForThisEndpoint.pm --
package MyHandler::ForThisEndpoint;
use Basehandler;

sub work_function_1 {}
  ...
sub work_function_100 {}

-- MyHandler/ForAnotherEndpoint.pm --
package MyHandler::ForAnotherEndpoint;
use Basehandler;

sub work_function_1 {}
  ...
sub work_function_100 {}
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