The civic group Tulum Unido is demanding that Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo sign the trust for Tulum's Environmental Sanitation Fee this week, delivering on a promise municipal officials made in front of Governor Mara Lezama.
The pledge came at the "La Voz del Pueblo" public audience held in Tulum on July 22, an event where the state government took in more than 740 citizen requests. Municipal authorities said there that the trust would be signed within two weeks, according to the group. Counting from that date, the two weeks close on Wednesday.
Every tourist who sleeps in a Tulum hotel pays the fee, night after night, and the revenue is meant for the problems the town wears on its surface, from the garbage it cannot process to the seaweed on its beaches. What Tulum Unido says is missing is the part that makes any of it checkable. There is no published figure for how much the fee raises, and no public account of where it lands.
Two weeks, and the trust is still unsigned
The group framed its demand as a question of follow-through. It said it will monitor the commitment so that it does not stop at declarations, and it noted that Castañón has not established the mechanism across his two terms in office.
The ask arrives in two steps. First, a formal council session to sign the trust. Then a plural technical council to administer it, with participation from sectors outside the city hall.
"Public commitments must be kept. Tulum deserves transparency and results," the group said.
Its stated goal is narrower than a slogan. Residents should be able to see how much money is collected, how it is managed, and which projects it pays for.
36 pesos a night into the environmental sanitation fee
The Environmental Sanitation Fee, known across Quintana Roo as the DSA, is a lodging charge collected by hotels and passed to the municipality. Rate tables published for 2026 put the charge in Tulum at 36 pesos per room per night for a single guest, with graduated additions for each extra occupant, against 83 pesos in Cancún.
Castañón changed how Tulum applies it, charging per tourist rather than per room, closer to the logic of the state lodging tax. That shift is one reason the hotel sector follows this fee more closely than any other line on a guest folio. Hotels are the collection point, and a fuller room now produces a larger transfer to the municipality.
Scale is harder to pin down. Tulum projected revenue of 28 million pesos from the fee for 2023, a figure the municipal government presented at the time. What the fee brings in today is not a public number, and that absence is the gap the trust is supposed to close.
A waste plant instead of a 70 million peso bill
Tulum Unido put a list of works behind the demand, and the first item on it is financial as much as environmental. A solid waste treatment plant, the group argues, would erase the 70 million pesos the municipality pays Playa del Carmen each year to take its garbage.
That arrangement is not new. Tulum has trucked its waste up the highway to the Solidaridad landfill for years, an operating cost that returns every budget cycle and has outlasted several promises to replace it.
The rest of the list runs to sargassum collection and beach cleaning, a wastewater treatment plant, and recycling and circular economy programs. All of it sits inside what the fee was written to cover.
Hoteliers asked for the same thing on June 10
Tulum Unido is not the first group to press the point this year. At the installation of the Municipal Tourism Advisory Council on June 10, hotel sector representatives raised the trust and the sargassum spending it would fund. Enrique Rodríguez Luna, speaking for the hotel association at that session, said the trust was close to being concluded.
The sector has been here before. In 2022, under a previous municipal administration, local media reported that Tulum hoteliers won an amparo against the city hall after it classified records on how sargassum removal money was being spent. The complaint then was the same one on the table now: that the people paying into the fund cannot see the fund.
The council Tulum Unido wants next
A trust would hold the revenue in a separate vehicle with its own administration rules, and it would open the spending to review from outside the municipal payroll. That last piece is the one the group underlines, and the technical council is the body it proposes to do it.
What that council would look like has not been defined in public. Tulum Unido has asked for it to be plural, so that key sectors take part in overseeing how the money is used, and it wants the signature first so the discussion has something to attach to.
The city hall has not announced a date for the session that would sign the trust. The two weeks the group is counting end Wednesday.
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