jruby warbler set Rails environment variable is not persisting when deployed with tomcat

Question

inside my warbler config file I have the following:

config.webxml.rails.env ='development'

i build my war, and deploy with the tomcat web utility, and when I go to the app it doesn't run, but instead of getting the development backtrace to help me figure out what isn't getting setup right, it just gives me the production 505 error page. Whats going on, is tomcat overriding my request and just serving up the 505 page from public?