Corion is right. It's not a Perl syntax issue, it's configuration.

Probably it's one of two things. You regenerated your schema so you lost the custom code/config or you need to s/startdate/start_date/ in the inflation definition in your Result package matching the table that holds the column.

You are either using DBIx::Class::InflateColumn::DateTime to inflate the column or doing it a bit more manually with DBIx::Class::InflateColumn; the second option seems more likely because the column name is repeated. Use the docs against your own .pm file and you should be able to fix it easily.

Update: didn't see you'd worked it out before posting.