The most straight forward change is to leave it a utility class and not have the private variables.  Have each of the functions get the config each time.  This shouldn't be to bad right now as they aren't used  a lot, but if that changes we might have to re-evaluate.  We can't put it directly in SparkEnv as that isn't created until after SparkContext and its needed before that in cases. thoughts on that?  

Thats probably not ideal still for multiple clients in the same jvm but I assume its no worse with some of the other configs.  This should get easier when we have a config system.