XmlParse() file search paths

I’m trying to migrate to Lucee 4.5 and I’m having an issue with an xmlParse() call to an xml config file that uses entity declarations like <!ENTITY dev SYSTEM "dev.xml"> to pull in other xml files. On ACF the relative file path works, but on Lucee 4.5, I get a file found error for /usr/local/apache-tomcat-8.5.16/bin/dev.xml. It works if I use the full path to the file, but this isn’t ideal since this path changes by environment. There are several ways I could work around this, but I’m wondering if there is an environment variable I can set or a JVM option I can pass to add the correct directory to the file search paths? I tried setting CLASSPATH in setenv.sh, but no difference.

Lucee 4.5 is end of life, why not use 5.2 ?