Found an easy solution So at first I found a way to get by but it was messy and the in page menus did not get updated when the left nav sub menu was updated. Then I found the menu block module.
- Install Menu Block Module https://drupal.org/project/Menu_Block
- add new menu block, configure as needed. starting level set to second level
- Add the following code to template file to invoke the menu block
You can get the number, in here its 1, from the url when you click configure for the menu block on the block page, so admin/structure/block/manage/menu_block/1/configure becomes:
$block = module_invoke('menu_block', 'block_view', '1');
print render($block['content']);
- Optional Create template for the menu by creating template file "menu-block-wrapper--1.tpl.php". you can get the menu data by looping through the array called $content