How to reduce number of connections using SQLAlchemy + postgreSQL?

I'm developing on heroku using their Postgres add-on with the Dev plan, which has a connection limit of 20. I'm new to python and this may be trivial, but I find it difficult to abstract the database connection without causing OperationalError: (OperationalError) FATAL: too many connections for role.

Currently I have databeam.py:

import os
from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from settings import databaseSettings

class Db(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.app = Flask(__name__)
        self.app.config.from_object(__name__)
        self.app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = os.environ.get('DATABASE_URL', databaseSettings())
        self.db = SQLAlchemy(self.app)

db = Db()

And when I'm creating a controller for a page, I do this:

import databeam

db = databeam.db
locations = databeam.locations

templateVars = db.db.session.query(locations).filter(locations.parent == 0).order_by(locations.order.asc()).all()

This does produce what I want, but slowly and at times causes the error metioned above. Since I come from a php background I have a certain mindset of how to deal with DB connections (I.e. like the example above), but I fear it doesn't fit well with python.

What is the proper way of abstracting the db connection in one place and then just using the same connection in all imports?