JSP EL Expression not being evaluated

Question

I have scoured this site but have not found a solution. EL Expression are not being evaluated. Everything works running via Eclipse and in our development environment but when deployed to our Test server (Apahe/Tomcat9), is not working. i.e. ${title} is displayed instead of the actual title value.

Using:

1. custom.tag called via <tags:custom title="Requests" displayName="requests" showResults="false" />

     <%@ tag language="java" pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
      <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %> 
      <%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/translator.tld" prefix="translator" %>
      <%@ attribute name="title" required="true"  %>
      <%@ attribute name="displayName" required="true" %>
      <%@ attribute name="showResults" required="true" %>

        <h1>${title}</h1> 

2. Pom:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
        <version>3.1.0</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet.jsp</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.servlet.jsp-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
    </dependency>

3. web.xml- tried using v3.1 with same issues

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
    http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/webapp_4_0.xsd" 
    version="4.0">